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16 Apr 2021
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from Josh Linkner, Author of Big Little Breakthroughs
00:19:01
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Josh Linkner.
Don’t forget the dinner mint. Don’t forget to add an element of surprise and delight for each interaction you have with a prospect or client. That tiny amount of extra effort often has an outsized impact on the end result.
There was a study that showed the effect of different ways of adding dinner mints to people’s meals and they found some pretty interesting results. Little good things have a big weight because they are unexpected. When you add up the little surprises and delights, they can outweigh the inevitable bad experiences.
The most valuable things you can do are things that help your client succeed, both on a professional level and a personal level. These could be little ways to innovate the delivery or make the experience a little more unique. You could also improve the process or offer them additional information or connections.
Tweaking the way you do things and measuring the results can lead to incredible breakthroughs. One example is the way that Mo offered webinars and follow up content. One simple tweak led to 10x times the result.
Small, low risk experiments in each area of your business will yield some incredible results. Not everything will succeed, but that’s why they’re small.
Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. What can you deliver that will be streamlined and effective, but also unique? A simple improvement would be to describe what you do in your client’s language instead of your own. A little extra effort in the delivery and presenting the solution in the client’s own language will make it feel completely unique to them and create a much more memorable experience with your business.
What Business Development REALLY Means, According to James Barclay
00:16:50
Mo asks James Barclay: Tell me your personal definition of business development.
Growth is all about your leading indicators. Your behaviors, values, and what you do every day are what will put you in a position to win.
Focusing on the end of the pipeline will make you look desperate. With the right values and habits, you’ll come up with the right tactics for the people looking to buy from you.
Helping is the key to growth. If every time someone reaches out you help them, at some point they will ask you what you do and be interested in what you sell, which is way more effective than reaching out to them to buy your stuff.
When someone asks you what you do, turn it around and ask them about themselves and their challenges while looking for an area that you may be able to help them, either with advice or a connection.
Curiosity is an emotion that humans love to experience. By getting the other person to ask what you do twice, it increases the curiosity element.
Business development is about providing a solution when the other person needs it, and this takes patience and consistency is providing value.
It can be even more powerful to be helpful when the other person is unable to buy your services.
One of James’ key qualifiers when selling to someone is whether they like him and James likes them as well.
It’s common for highly analytical people to talk about anything other than their content and expertise. If you find yourself uncomfortable in a sales environment, your clients probably feel the same. Finding the place that you're comfortable with could actually be the sweet spot between you and other analytical prospects.
Reach out with useful content between billable projects. Sending an asset or an idea is an effective way to keep the conversation going.
How to Meet Whoever You Want Using Scalable Methods
00:31:03
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m wrapping up the last several videos where we discussed different methods for meeting new people. I shared several different ways to meet whomever you want, and in this episode, you’ll learn tips for using webinars and speaking engagements, social media for lead generation, Episodic Writing, and so much more.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The types of scalable methods
How to get started with these methods
How to be successful during these events
How to create a call to action
Who should use social media
How to do it properly
How to be successful with this method
What Episodic Writing is
Where to publish your content
How to use this method to meet people
How to get started
Figuring out who to target
Pro ninja tips for making these methods work for you
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can’t make this happen. I shared several different ways to meet whomever you want, and next, I want you to think through and find a couple of methods that you could best leverage your strengths with.
Different methods work for different people, and it’s important for you to find what’s best for you. Start with who exactly you want to meet and how you can best offer them value. Then, using your strengths, use one of these methods and I know you’ll find success.
How to Meet and Form Meaningful Relationships with the “Interviewing Others” Method
00:05:47
This is the final episode about how you can get introduced to the people you want to with the Targeted Method. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m covering how powerful it can be to interview someone as a way to meet them. This is called the Interviewing Others Method and it is really powerful and simple.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What this method is
How to find the right platform to use
Why this method works
This isn’t a difficult method to understand - it’s actually really simple. You want to find a reason and platform for the interview and make it meaningful. This is an excellent way to get in front of those people that you really want to meet. With it, you’ll also get several touch points so that you can deepen the relationship and show them that you’re human first and hirable second.
Shawn Blanc on Building Margin Into Your Life So You Can Win More
00:59:47
Shawn Blanc shares how margin impacts every area of your life, and why every professional who is serious about building authentic business relationships needs margin to do it. Learn how margin allows you to say yes to the most important things, how to create genuine relationships, and why slowing down and planning can save not just your business, but also your life.
Mo asks Shawn Blanc: What big idea do you have that professionals can use to do a better job at business development?
Margin, also known as breathing room, is the space in our lives between the stuff that we do and the limit where we fall off the cliff. It’s very easy, especially in the world of business, for people to push their energy to the absolute limits where there is zero margin in our lives.
Margin can apply to more than just business, it can apply to all areas and relationships in your life.
Having breathing room in Shawn’s life helps him lean into his strength as a Yellow thinker. Shawn feels the constant need to fill every moment in his life with something productive, so the reminder of building in the margins is critical to doing his best work.
Working on projects that are due weeks ahead instead of the next morning allows you to work more effectively with less stress.
For business and your personal life, margin exists to benefit your relationships. When you have no margin in your life you are tapped out in your schedule and physically, and this leaves little strength left over for your relationships, including business development.
Mo asks Shawn Blanc: How do we use margin to grow our book of business and get more opportunities?
Shawn shares the parable of the good samaritan and how margin relates to opportunities.
The ability to say no to certain opportunities is as important as the ability to say yes. When we are not clear around our priorities or have no margin within our schedule, it can be easy to say yes to everything and become overwhelmed. This puts strain on your work when truly great opportunities come your way.
Margin can enable us to say yes to the most important stuff. It also helps us know when to say no to certain things so that we can show up with our greatest strength during times of opportunity.
Evaluating opportunities is not binary, it’s an organic process. The first step is knowing your values and understanding how you work within your daily schedule. Does the opportunity align with what you care about? If it does, what are the most important things on your schedule, and do you have enough resources and time to say yes to the opportunity? Lastly, if it is important and time is tight, is there something you can give up on to take the opportunity on?
Business development is probably one of the most important things you can do for your career, yet it’s one of the first areas the professionals let slide when time gets tough. Great rainmakers have a roadmap for what they are going to do in terms of business development.
You have to be proactive with your time and have the clarity to know what the most important things are so they don’t get pushed aside.
Shawn’s team works in eight-week cycles which have been transformative for his business. The first six weeks are focused work time for clearly defined projects and the following week is a buffer for review. The eighth week is time off for the entire team.
This work cycle structure allows Shawn’s team to accomplish more in less time while also building in time to recover and celebrate what they have achieved.
Mo asks Shawn Blanc: How can we use margin and apply it to long-term relationships?
Margin exists for relationships. We need to have breathing room in our time, in our money, and in our energy to be able to build relationships. Margin allows us to build and strengthen and grow long-term relationships as well as new ones.
People often view the business of business development and sales as an impossible environment to build authentic relationships but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can build the relationship first and it can result in additional business, but if not that’s okay too.
Margin is the foundation for being truly authentic in a relationship. Without it, you will find yourself in meetings because you need the business and it will come across in the conversation.
Margin helps us with perspective and allows you to create relationships in the long term.
Great business development is about creating a better future for other people. Your core expertise is how you impact people in a positive way and relationship-oriented business development is how you do that.
In Shawn’s experience, providing a lot of value upfront and being clear about the nature of the relationship is what leads to long-term success. The idea of serving is paramount instead of converting each user to a customer immediately.
Having confidence in your ability to help people is the key to turning them into a customer. The imposter syndrome is what prevents people from understanding the value they can actually add to their customer’s lives. Pulling people from one side of complexity to the other is immensely valuable.
For some people, you need to charge enough money just to get their attention. A big part of your pricing is who your target customer is, and what price you need to charge to deliver your best work. For Shawn, the number is high enough so that the client will take it as seriously as he will.
Mo asks Shawn Blanc: How do we apply margin to better manage ourselves and get more done?
There are five components of a focused life. The final section is on margin and maintaining breathing room in your life, because that’s the make or break it for your life.
Margin is the space between your load and your breaking point. Finances are the only area of your life that can be lived beyond your means, every other area has a hard limit.
Having breathing room within your schedule, relationships, and emotions allows you to continue doing the things that matter the most to you.
You hack your habits by giving yourself the healthy breathing room you need to sustain it without getting burned out.
It sometimes feels impossible to create this margin in your life, but burnout is impossible to sustain as well. You can either recognize it and make the choice to create margin in your life, or your circumstances will make those choices for you.
The two most dangerous years of your life are the year you are born and the year after you retire. We run our lives near the redline all the way to retirement which often results in an untimely demise when we abruptly stop.
Where in your life are you redlining that you need some breathing room in? What can you do now to reduce your load in that area?
Shawn has a simple process that he uses to assess the tasks in his life and figure out what can be eliminated to either reduce his load or increase his limits. If you don’t think you have time to start planning, the first thing you need to do is eliminate something from your schedule.
If you’re already on the edge of burnout, it’s not the time to take on new things. When you have no flexibility in your schedule, you have no time for anyone.
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Shawn Blanc.
You need to have a plan around business development. A great business developer has a roadmap and knows what they are focused on over time.
Great rainmakers not only have an annual plan, but they also have it broken down into monthly, weekly, and daily tasks.
When everything is mapped out, you can evaluate opportunities accurately against your plan and understand what is worth your time. Without the plan, you are probably just saying yes to everything that comes your way.
Margin can be applied to the four areas of how we think. If you’re feeling stressed about your metrics, you need to expand your pipeline. If you feel stressed about deadlines, you need to pull back and create space to do your best work. If you don’t feel like you have any goodwill left in your relationships, you need to add margin by giving back. For strategy, you need to get down to three main focuses and measure against them.
If you feel like you don’t have the time to make a plan, that’s the signal that you need a plan. Start with looking at what you can delegate or eliminate to free up time so you can come up with a plan and create margin in your strategy.
If you don’t take the time to slow down and breathe, your body will force you to eventually.
Brent Atkins’ Favorite Business Development Strategy
00:22:45
Mo asks Brent Atkins: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG training or Snowball System?
Brent’s first favorite teaching is the walk around the brain. The science of how different people think is unbelievably valuable and creating a presentation that touches on all four quadrants is very effective.
For Progyny, that looks like recognizing that the appeal of their program changes from Red/Yellow to Green/Blue as they move up the continuum of decision makers has been game changing.
The four quadrants being strategic, practical, analytical, and relational.
For Progyny, Strategic looks like finding ways to improve an organization’s benefit spend that adds value and speaks to diversity and inclusion initiatives. It’s about listening to the organization's priorities and tailoring the offer to that.
For Practical, Progyny has been in business for seven years now and has a retention of 99%, so they have been changing their story from the cutting edge solution to the safe choice for organizations.
People don’t buy Progyny for the dollar benefits, although that is important. They buy for the experience of helping people create families.
Progyny focuses on creating the story for an organization that gets them to mentally buy in before dealing with the analytical aspects.
You do not have to be a commodity. So many professionals get into a race to the bottom about pricing because they don’t talk about it properly.
Managing the metrics associated with the business development process is critically important to the success of the organization.
You have to create the curiosity to create the need. Once you create the need you create the story. Once you create the story and ask for a couple pieces of information, you build your model. When you follow that process, you will have a much higher closing rate.
Glen Jackson on Preeminence – What You Need To Succeed
00:13:19
Mo asks Glen Jackson: What is your big idea on how we can grow our book of business and enhance our career?
Glen’s big idea is the acronym DTU (Do The Unexpected) which is the exact opposite of an IOU. DTU’s are about motivation instead of obligation and when done sincerely and genuinely can be incredibly powerful in creating relationships.
They come in all shapes and sizes. A smaller DTU could be writing a handwritten note to someone you interacted with recently. Everyone wants to feel noteworthy, and writing a note is a great example of how to make that happen.
When you refresh others, you refresh yourself. Glen tells the story of how he got caught in the rain and was rescued by a cab driver that went out of his way to help Glen, and how Glen paid the cab driver back.
One of the easiest ways to show that you care is listening well. In a conversation with someone, you may discover a topic that you can help them learn more about, and pointing them in the right direction is a simple way to do that.
The best way to create influence with individuals is through empathy and showing that you care. Always tie the DTU to something meaningful to the other person because personalization is where the meaning is going to be.
Everything you do is a brand ambassador. Everything you do is seen and everything you say is heard by someone.
The Business Development Story That Changed Everything for Monty Hamilton
00:13:31
Mo asks Monty Hamilton: Tell us a business development story that you are really proud of.
Monty’s proudest moment occurred three years ago, when they sold a stake in Rural Sourcing to Bain Capital. It took building the right relationships and getting people to believe in the mission, vision, and story of the organization.
Monty brought them into the center in Alabama to give them a feel for the culture and the organization beyond the numbers. After visiting the center, Monty and the crew from Bain Capital had their flights delayed, so he had the opportunity of spending five hours in a rental car with them.
No matter how well you practice and prepare, there are always going to be curveballs thrown your way. If you can take them in stride and play your hand well, you can come out the other side and you will win more than you lose.
The part of the story that Monty was most proud of was his confidence in himself and his ability to be authentic with people that could have been intimidating. Being confident and authentic is what allows you to perform in business development situations, whether that’s selling your business or selling the next deal.
When you’re authentic, the other person knows exactly what they’re buying. It’s much worse to pretend and end up delivering subpar results.
Going Back In Time, What Scott Winter Would Say To His Younger Self
00:16:27
Mo asks Scott Winter: If you could send a video back in time specifically on business development, what would it say?
The first thing Scott would say to his younger self would be to buy as much Bitcoin as possible. Seriously though, he would try to help his younger self get past the limiting belief that sales is a bad thing.
No matter who you are, you have to sell. Do what you have to do to learn that skill sooner in a way that brings you enjoyment, because it’s going to serve you for the rest of your life.
Do something you’re passionate about, and embrace the idea of business development.
If you only have deep expertise, no one will know you exist and nothing will get done. If you only know sales, you will never do anything really meaningful. When you have both you can change the world.
Deep expertise gives you the foundation for building trust and confidence with a prospect that you can actually help solve their problem, and you can use that to inform your ability to communicate that well.
Even now, Scott struggles with how to structure emails perfectly and doing the right amount of outreach. You don’t need to be perfect, you just need to put in the work consistently and genuinely care about the prospect or client’s outcome.
Just like sports or any skill that you want to improve, business development takes practice.
James Barclay Uncovers the Magnetic Strategies That Attract Your Ideal Clients
01:08:10
James Barclay shares the key content creation strategies that Passel uses to help busy professionals demonstrate the expertise that sets them and their firms apart. Learn about how content creation became the basis for Passel’s business model, how to write and create content for your most important relationships in a way that people will love, and why a podcast is the secret business development hack that most professionals aren’t using right now.
Mo asks James Barclay: When did you realize that business development was great?
James' first job out of college was as a conference organizer and that’s where he learned the power of selling ideas.
Selling conferences in the 1990s changed once the internet became more established and James began using websites to promote them, but they discovered that brochure websites weren’t very effective which led to creating content based websites instead.
The skills that James and his business partners developed in creating those businesses were a natural fit for content online, but he realized that taking the expertise in his head and sharing it online was actually really difficult. That’s where the idea for Passle came from.
Showcasing your expertise online as an expert is crucial, especially when people are still not visiting businesses physically as much.
Do something rather than nothing, and realize that you won’t be great at it straight away.
Run an audit of LinkedIn to see who you are connected to. Compare that list to a list of the people that give you money for what you do, and if you’re not connected with the people who give you money correct that.
Write short, client focused and timely content at least once a month.
Your content should be easy to consume and don’t outsource it. Someone shouldn’t be pretending to be you online.
Taking content that is already published is a great place to start. Just add your own perspective or commentary to something that already exists.
Picture one of your top ten to twenty clients and write something that you know will resonate with them then publish that on a public space like LinkedIn or your blog. Ask them directly what they would be interested in, and then write content around those answers.
At the very least share your company’s content and provide some commentary on it. You need to be digitally active. People won’t be thinking of you if you’re not present in the public square that is social media.
Write for one person instead of writing for everyone. Think of the people that pay you money for your expertise and then write content with one of those people in mind. They are the most likely to share your content and refer you to other people when they find it useful. That’s how you give your raving fans ammunition.
Mo asks James Barclay: Tell me your personal definition of business development.
Growth is all about your leading indicators. Your behaviors, values, and what you do every day are what will put you in a position to win.
Focusing on the end of the pipeline will make you look desperate. With the right values and habits, you’ll come up with the right tactics for the people looking to buy from you.
Helping is the key to growth. If every time someone reaches out you help them, at some point they will ask you what you do and be interested in what you sell, which is way more effective than reaching out to them to buy your stuff.
When someone asks you what you do, turn it around and ask them about themselves and their challenges while looking for an area that you may be able to help them, either with advice or a connection.
Curiosity is an emotion that humans love to experience. By getting the other person to ask what you do twice, it increases the curiosity element.
Business development is about providing a solution when the other person needs it, and this takes patience and consistency is providing value.
It can be even more powerful to be helpful when the other person is unable to buy your services.
One of James’ key qualifiers when selling to someone is whether they like him and James likes them as well.
It’s common for highly analytical people to talk about anything other than their content and expertise. If you find yourself uncomfortable in a sales environment, your clients probably feel the same. Finding the place that you're comfortable with could actually be the sweet spot between you and other analytical prospects.
Reach out with useful content between billable projects. Sending an asset or an idea is an effective way to keep the conversation going.
Mo asks James Barclay: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG Training or the Snowball System?
For James, the number one strategy is the Protemoi List. These are the people in your circle that are your partners, prospects, and the key people that could be your raving fans.
Having a focused relationship list is an unbeatable edge.
When you invest in a relationship, people will move with you. James has had people buy from his company multiple times over multiple jobs.
Your Protemoi List is a list of five to ten people that have outsized returns on the amount of time and energy you invest in the relationship.
The first strategy is to simply be useful to them. Offer to take them to events with you that you believe would be helpful to them. Find content and then pass it on to people you think would find it useful.
Celebrate them at every opportunity. Accelerate them and give them a platform where you highlight them and what they are doing.
A personal newsletter can be incredibly powerful. You don’t need thousands of people on your list for it to be worth it.
Build something that is extremely accessible to them, extremely useful to them, and don’t waste their time.
It can take some time to build momentum, but you have to start somewhere. If you can write something useful for one person you can build it over time and create something really valuable.
Consistency matters. Find a cadence that works for you and your schedule and stick with it.
Mo asks James Barclay: Tell me a story about the business development that you are the proudest of.
James’ challenge in reaching prospects is connecting with CMOs in law firms and working up the chain can take some time. The Passel podcast was born once the team understood how useful it is as a business development tool.
The podcast gives them an opportunity to talk to their perfect prospects and gives them a chance to talk about the things they are passionate about while getting to know them at the same time. Eventually, the CMO starts asking about James and the team does and it’s a great way to have the right conversations with the right people.
The more fantastic content you have on a podcast, the more of their target customers become interested in being featured on the podcast.
James found that short and sharp podcasts perform best. Celebrate what your guest has accomplished and give them a platform. Your podcast should have a specific theme and structure for the episodes, and understand that it’s a skill that takes time to learn and get good at.
If you can, provide feedback and let your guest know how many people listened to their interview.
Seasons are a good framework, along with having a set of questions that you can repeat and reuse.
Repurposing the asset after the fact is another great way to get more exposure.
Make sure you know what the win is for the interviewee.
Mo asks James Barclay: If you could record a video around business development and send it back to your younger self, what would it say?
James is naturally impatient, so he would tell his younger self to cultivate patience.
You can’t sell stuff by shouting at people that they should buy from you. It’s not your sales process, it’s about their buying process.
Think about the actions that you can do consistently that will lay the groundwork for outcomes instead of focusing on the outcomes themselves.
Accept the fact that you are often fighting fires and won’t always be perfect at your business development habits. Having a team that can support you and keep you on track when you need it is a big asset. Make sure you are surrounded by people you trust.
Set some time aside each week to track your most important things and what you got done and what’s still on the list.
James would always tell his younger self that the best ideas don’t come when you’re looking at a screen. Your best ideas will come when you’re unplugged.
Mastering Impactful Communication with Michael Weitz
00:49:49
Wondering how you can learn to communicate more effectively?
I have such a fun episode for you on this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue! I sat down with Michael Weitz who is a communication guru! Michael came from the world of theater and what he brought with him to the world of business is the notion that it's not just about presence, it's not just about having great stories and great data and great content. It's not just having a great strategy. You need all these things to really be an impactful communicator and to really have mastery. That’s what he does for his clients and he’s sharing all of his tips with us today.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why communication is one of the top skills you can have for success
The power communication has to really impact your audience
The two parts of inspiring that you need to understand
The four questions to ask to get the core of any conversation or story
Story-driven ways to inspire change
The power of getting clear about your values
How to tap into conviction and integrity when communicating
Using sensory language and emotion in our communication
Finding out your presence
Tips for managing dopamine
Effective communication can inspire true change. There’s a lot that goes into being a good communicator, but taking the tips Michael shared today and putting them into practice when you are communicating with clients or an audience will be a game-changer for you.
If you want to hear more from Michael, you can find him on LinkedIn or send him an email at michael@virtuozo.com.
Embracing Humanity in Business Relationships with Terry Isner
00:46:23
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I sat down with Terry Isner from Jaffe PR. Terry has a deep expertise in law firm topics, PR, business development, and so much more. He’s here to talk about all of these things and dive into how we can change the way that boardrooms think and act today. No one wants to be a vendor or a client anymore, we want to be partners, and that requires a shift in the way we do things in business so we can embrace the humanity of it all.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why we need to be more people-centric in boardrooms
The impact of social issues on businesses today
How to find your company culture
How we can all lead when it comes to the issues we face in the boardroom
Why changing the terminology you use in business changes the mindset
How empathy, compassion, and kindness are linked to your bottom line
Ways to get everyone in the organization involved in bringing in ideas
Getting immersed in learning opportunities for continued growth
The importance of allowing people to be themselves in business
The business opportunities available to us when we adapt to change
How to tackle the hard and scary challenges in business
A lot has changed in business in recent years, and the power exists with the people now. To be successful, it’s important for businesses to shift the way they are doing things and focus more on the human-centric aspects and how they can give everyone a voice.
If you enjoyed this conversation and want to connect with Terry and learn more about what we discussed today, make sure to visit his website to check out the resources there.
How to Use The Personal MBA to Create and Close More Opportunities, with Josh Kaufman
00:10:55
Mo asks Josh Kaufman: How can the ideas of The Personal MBA help people manage their opportunities?
Begin with a thought experiment. “What would it look like if…?” Counterfactual questions can be extremely useful for understanding what is true in the given moment, and what could be a way of making things better in the future.
Business development is all about the future. Asking this sort of question takes you out of the present situation and gives you clarity on what’s possible.
All of the most valuable questions in business start with that question. These questions allow you to supply your brain with a destination which is how you start formulating a plan to get there.
This is a powerful tool to get unstuck and figure out what your next action should be regarding an opportunity. Most of the breakthroughs in Josh’s career have come from posing this thought experiment.
As you are planning out the next quarter and figuring out how to reach your financial or personal goals, the way you get your brain in gear to solve the problem is by asking yourself a counterfactual question.
Starting from the question allows you to avoid being mired in self-criticism and doubt. You will come up with ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise because you weren’t framing the problem in that particular way.
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, we are diving into collaboration with Deb Mashek. The problems that have the biggest impact for your clients are the ones that require collaboration across teams internally, so this is a super important topic and I’m excited to explore it today. Deb is sharing her best secrets for success.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why collaboration ends up being harder than expected
How to take the Ecosystem approach to collaboration
The importance of relationship quality and interdependence
The trust it takes to be interdependent with others
The brilliant way to ask for help
The number one correlation to our success
Why we need to be using the right language when communicating
Using collaboration for cross-selling
How to break down walls and build trust internally
What collaborative action is and why it’s important
The necessity of collaborative culture and how to achieve it
Defining what collaboration means to your organization
The things people get wrong about collaboration
How Deb continues to learn
Collaboration is not always as simple as it seems. You want to define what collaboration means to your organization and what that looks like. Creating a culture of collaboration will make a huge difference in the way your team works together internally.
Social psychologist Deb Mashek helps organizations create the conditions for collaboration to thrive. An experienced business advisor, professor, and nonprofit executive, her writing appears in MIT-Sloan Management Review, Fortune, ReWorked, The Hechinger Report, and Psychology Today. Deb has been an invited speaker on collaboration and viewpoint diversity at leading organizations including the United Nations and the American Psychological Association. She is the international bestselling author of Collabor(h)ate.
How to Use Public Speaking to Create and Close More Opportunities, with Michael Port
00:19:21
Mo asks Michael Port: How can the audience create and close more opportunities?
All sales offers should be proportionate to the amount of trust we’ve earned. When Michael started as an entrepreneur who wasn’t very comfortable making big sales offers so he started thinking about what people responded well to. This led him to the idea of inviting people during a weekly teleconference call.
He started speaking about ideas that would help people think bigger about who they were and help advance their professional goals. He found that after six months of doing those calls, they had brought in 85% of the clients he had at the time. The interesting part was that although he made no sales offers during the calls, people were raising their hands to discuss working with him as a natural extension of the process.
Rather than trying to sell every time you meet somebody, think about what you can invite them to that would add value to their lives and that you can do on a regular basis. You will start to find that it will begin to create business development opportunities for you.
Using speaking as a promotional tool is one of the most effective tools you can employ, because there are very few environments that immediately infer credibility. The mistake that most people make is believing that they should be selling during the presentation, so Michael focuses on helping people deliver transformational speeches.
If the audience has a transformation in that period of time while you’re on stage, all they need to know is that they can work with you and they will ask to work with you.
If you have a truly transformational product, you don’t need a lot of marketing or selling because the product will do it for you. When you are delivering a speech, you should be getting stage-side leads every single time and if you get those leads, you will get clients and referrals for additional speaking opportunities.
You can mention your services but keep it a light touch. Deliver something that people want, and if they want more of it they will book you as a consultant.
Speaking live allows you to affect the way the audience feels and that’s the most important aspect of connection.
How To Categorize and Store Your Learned Knowledge in a “Second Brain” with Tiago Forte
00:50:14
I have a real treat for you in this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue! I sat down with Tiago Forte, the author of Building a Second Brain, which is one of my favorite books ever. Tiago is here to share more about the absolute superpower of building a “second brain” and how you can use his mnemonics and systems, such as the PARA Method, to take your business development to the next level. Truly, his methods will help you separate yourself from 95% of other people when building relationships.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why building a second brain is such a superpower and how you can build your own
The power of having a system for cataloging important information
The ability to think once, and then capitalize on it again and again
Why anyone can benefit from having a second brain
Where to put the information that you capture so that you can maximize its value
The key to overcoming information overload
How to apply the PARA Method in your business development process
The true power of making learning a priority
How to separate yourself from 95% of people in business and life
Tiago’s favorite apps for creating your second brain
The 4 archetypes that will help you find the perfect app for you
What you need to know about team knowledge management
I hope you found some value in this episode with Tiago! There is so much power in having a “second brain” to store all of the information that you have gathered throughout your career. It can be really instrumental in standing out in your business development efforts.
If you were as inspired by Tiago as I was and want to learn more, visit his website to check out all of his resources and find the YouTube videos we spoke about. Make sure to also get yourself a copy of Building A Second Brain. I know you won’t regret it!
Check out Tiago’s new book focusing on and going deeper into the PARA method: https://a.co/d/bTsN0zm
17 Jul 2021
Karim Nehdi Discusses Using The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument for Whole Brain Business Development
01:18:09
Karim Nehdi shows you how to read your prospect’s mind so you can tailor your service offer to exactly what they want. Learn how the Herrmann Brain Dominance model works in business development and how you can use the concept to better understand how a prospect thinks, what they care about most in terms of communication, and how you can use that to close more deals.
Mo asks Karim Nehdi: What is your big idea on how people can grow their book of business, relationships, and career?
Different people think differently, but most people don’t realize what that really means. The most effective leaders and business developers are able to harness the differences in thought and cognitive diversity for maximum effect.
We all have neural pathways that shift over time. We innately default to seeking out people that think like us, but the best teams break out of that pattern and tap into the differences in the way that people think.
Karim is the CEO of Herrmann International and has been working with Mo for a long time in many of the programs he’s developed.
We are just scratching the potential of what the brain is capable of. We’ve learned over the past few decades that there are cognitive modes that dictate the way that we think, and the four different modes come together in different measures within each person.
The first system is analytical thought. The second is structural thought. The third is relational thought. The fourth is experimental thought. We have all four pathways in our brains, but over time we come to default to one or two primarily, and that’s where the trouble comes in.
People think they connect on preferences and areas they align. When you feel a match with someone the ideas tend to flow fairly easily, but when there’s a mismatch, the interaction can be awkward or difficult.
A good example would be the IT team and the customer facing team. They both think in nearly opposite ways, and this can create tension in an organizational setting.
In a business development context, understanding the differences can be very powerful. If you sense the prospect is risk averse, you should probably minimize the experimental and transformational elements of the pitch and focus on the process and how it all works.
The most important component of good management, good leadership, and good stewardship is making sure that you have diversity of mind. Leaders that can bring a unique viewpoint and harness that within their organization can have a big impact.
3% of people are balanced across all four quadrants. Everyone can tap into the four different thinking systems. You just have to be willing to stretch and flex those cognitive muscles.
Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How can we use our cognitive diversity to create and close more deals?
What if you could read the minds of your customers and predict their response in advance? That would be an incredibly powerful business development skill.
The first step is understanding yourself and where your preferences lie. For Mo, he fell into the experimental/analytical spectrum and knowing that helped him understand what was really on his mind and how he approached life.
Your unique thinking style comes with strengths but also potential blindspots. Your default thinking may be leading you in the wrong direction for a deal, and if you never look back or get into the habit of thinking about your thinking, you will keep making the same mistakes.
Once you know what your thought process is like, you can use that as a model to consider how a prospect might be thinking. Think about one of your most important customers and take a guess about what they might be thinking about in terms of what you are offering.
If they are a big picture experimental thinker, maybe they are looking for something more innovative. If they are more relational thinkers, maybe they want to know they are going to be taken care of and are really concerned about what everyone else thinks. If they are structural thinkers, they are probably hyper-focused on the details and whether the offer will deliver exactly what they need. If they are analytical thinkers, they can be very price sensitive and looking for the greatest measurable ROI for them.
Understanding the different types of buyers can allow you to position your product or service around what their needs might be.
Don’t assume that people are on the same wavelength as you and ask the question about what they need.
There are certain ways of thinking that tend to manifest more often in certain industries. Analytical thinkers like actuaries are probably all about the bottom line and being efficient in their communication. Structural thinkers are probably all about the details. Relational thinkers may ask you about your personal life and will probably engage with you beyond verbal communication. Experimental thinkers will ask a lot of questions to try to connect the dots, and you might see them work out their thought process in the conversation.
Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How do we use cognitive diversity and adapt to each of these four different ways of thinking?
The baseline is to understand where you are likely to default and what your blindspots are going to be. Think about your pitch through the lens of what the stakeholder wants to hear and needs to understand in order to feel comfortable to move forward.
This can mean adding in additional details for the structural buyer, including some ROI calculations for the analytic buyer, bringing in other clients to speak on your behalf for the relational buyer, or coming up with some novel ideas for the experimental buyer.
Prepare your thinking in advance and try to start the conversation with where their preferences are instead of starting with where you are at.
We often think about relationships on a one-on-one basis, but there are lots of people involved in the business development process. Business development is all about making your team work seamlessly with your customer’s team which is where cognitive diversity comes in. You need to make sure that the people on your team that think a certain way are being paired up with people that need to think that way.
You need everybody to be on the same page and moving in the same direction to take advantage of an opportunity, and understanding how each person on the team thinks and facilitates that knowledge transfer.
In just 10 minutes you can get a basic understanding of the mindsets on your team and identify some of the things you need to do to bridge the gap. Taking the time to think about your thinking has a massive ROI in business outcomes.
Understanding the thought processes of the individuals at play builds trust and allows people to communicate and solve problems more effectively.
Challenge everyone that is involved in the conversation to think about their thinking and how it’s going to play out in the success of the stakeholder.
Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How can we use cognitive diversity to hack our own habits and be more successful, even when we’re busy?
Business development is a team sport. There is a role for the individual relationship, but there is also an important role for the team that supports that relationship.
Research shows that cognitively diverse teams who know how to harness cognitive diversity are 60-70% more effective than teams that don’t. Cognitive diversity accounts for about 20% of the variance in overall team performance and up to 34% in specific activities like strategic thinking and problem solving.
The first hack is around making sure your team is built in a diversity by design way. If you all share the biases and blindspots, they will be magnified in a deal context. On the other extreme, if you have too much cognitive diversity without the tools to manage it, it can create emergent conflict.
When you’re building a team, an easy way to stay balanced is to ensure you have at least one person who can represent the mindset of someone from each quadrant. Have an experimental thinker that can connect the dots, a analytical thinker who is going to be ready with an ROI calculation when you need it, a relational thinker who is able to build the personal connection, and a structural thinker that is going to make sure the customer has everything they need to feel comfortable.
The best teams have a steward for each way of thinking. The lone experimental thinker may be an outlier, but they are also probably the most necessary mindset.
Karim tells a story of a CEO that he worked with that had a specific set of questions answered at every meeting. Why, What, Who, How? Coincidentally, those four questions map to the four quadrants of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument.
One way to take notes in a meeting is to create the four quadrants and write down notes in the corresponding mindset/question. If you notice that an area is missing, you can bring the focus there before the meeting wraps up.
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Karim Nehdi.
There are four major ways we think: analytically, structurally, relationally, and experimentally, and each way of thinking gives clues.
With an analytical thinker, they are going to be quick and cut to the chase. They want to jump right into the meeting and get things done.
With the structural thinker, they will want to know the details and what the process looks like. They want to know the steps to start something and how to keep it going.
With a relational thinker, you will see clues that they care with more emotion in their voice. They probably think from the perspective of other people and ask more questions to dial up the engagement.
With an experimental thinker, they may zig zag in the conversation and want to do things that haven’t been done before. Experimental thinkers want to connect the dots.
Analytical thinkers want to dial in the ROI, structural thinkers desire safety, relational thinkers want more connection to you and your team, and experimental thinkers want a strategic fit with where they are heading.
To adapt to a person’s thought style, make it easy to talk about what matters to them, whether that is money and ROI, that you’re a safe choice, that your team is ready to engage, or what you stand for and how it aligns with their goals.
Big deals are sold by teams, to teams. You can really knock a deal out of the park by covering all four ways of thinking.
How to Create Unstoppable Momentum Using the BIG Method
00:09:00
In the last two episodes, we discussed the importance of taking a quick scan of your opportunity list and relationships, or first among equals list. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m sharing step three of this method. In this step, you’re going to pick three actions that you’re going to take in the next week that are going to either move your relationships or your opportunities forward.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What BIG stands for
How to use this method to move your business forward
The key here is consistency. By staying consistent with this method and picking your three most important things every week and getting them done, you will create unstoppable momentum. It’s a game-changer. You’ll always be moving your opportunities and relationships forward which will lead to more success.
To go deeper into this topic, check out Teresa Amabile’s TED Talk. She has some really great tips and advice that I think you’ll enjoy.
The Business Development Story That Changed Everything for Jane Allen
00:13:04
Mo asks Jane Allen: Tell us a business development story that you are really proud of.
Jane tells the story from the early 2000’s during a time when the people they were serving in corporate America were being overwhelmed by the explosion of data. One fateful dinner and “what if” scenario later, Jane started collaborating with a firm to solve real world problems with a solution that was unheard of at the time.
As an entrepreneur, Jane didn’t take time to reflect on the success since she was so focused on the execution. Looking back now, finding a partner that was willing to take a risk and then deliver something that enabled her clients to practice law in a completely different way is something she’s very proud of.
In terms of her career, Jane is most proud of the incredible people she worked with and learned from, as well as being willing to take the chance on herself and her vision for her business.
Reach for your goals and take the chance. Rejection is a part of life, but you will never achieve anything if you don’t try.
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from Ozan Varol, Author of Think Like a Rocket Scientist
00:13:29
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Ozan Varol.
Always having a couple moonshot ideas that you are working on is incredibly valuable as you are working on the day to day tasks of business development.
For something to be a moonshot, it has to be something that would completely change the game, for example, a 10x investment. What can you work on that is totally different from what you are doing right now, that if it worked, would be a 10x game changer for your business.
There is a large correlation between highly efficient people and problem solvers and the ability to reframe questions. The ability to reframe the question behind your actions is how you can achieve incredible results. Instead of getting stuck in a rut, stepping back and seeing the bigger strategy may be what you need to do to see better alternatives.
By reframing the question we get a much broader context of what we might do next.
Being willing to admit that you know nothing opens up your mind to learning. The beginner’s mindset is liberating and puts you in a position to learn more.
We have to seek outside our tiny ecosystem of our business and clients to see other ways of doing things that can unlock innovations that can change everything.
Going Back In Time, What Bonneau Ansley Would Say To His Younger Self
00:12:14
Mo asks Bonneau Ansley: If you could record a message to your younger self around business development, what would it say?
In school, Bonneau would have told himself to not worry too much about failing Geology and Mrs. Jones is not going to be there to critique you for the rest of your life.
In college, it would have been to try more things while avoiding some bad influences.
After college, he would have told himself to go somewhere new. It wasn’t until he left his hometown that he really learned the skills he needed to succeed on his own.
One key lesson that Bonneau would share is to not be afraid of reinventing yourself. Even with scary situations, there is opportunity to learn. They are all part of your path to discovering what you want to do for the long haul.
Don’t wait so long to start your business. It’s okay to buck the trend and start something sooner than you think you should. You’re more ready than you realize.
Mo tells the story of how Bonneau called him up and told that they were going to spend the night at a homeless shelter and plan out what they were going to achieve the next year.
To climb, Bonneau cuts. To make a greater impact, Bonneau doesn’t hesitate to say no to something that isn’t at the level of what he’s trying to achieve.
Bonneau does a lot of investing and one of the most important ways he figures out who to work with is by identifying the founders that are passionate for what they are working on beyond the potential profit.
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from Todd Henry, Author of the Accidental Creative
00:26:50
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Todd Henry.
Long scale creativity is a process, just like business development. The Snowball System and the Grow Big Training are a creative synthesis of the business development practices that have been shown to work across industries and time.
Any kind of long-term sustainable work, whether that’s growing a business or learning a language, takes a long time to get there. As soon as you realize that, you can identify the process behind it.
Anybody who is great at something has both learned it and earned it by developing a process around it.
“You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” -Jack London
You should walk into your first meeting with someone with a hypothesis as to what’s going on, but lead with broad questions. Ask enough questions about the prospect’s situation until you can articulate back their problem to them better than they can describe it themselves.
By asking questions first, you get a triple win. Good questions light up the pleasure center of the other person’s mind, you are going to learn their priorities in their words, and the more self-disclosing information they give you, the more they like you. You have a higher chance of getting the yes at the end by starting with great questions at the beginning.
A simple tactic you can use to take your business development efforts to the next level is the head-to-head. Find someone who is moving in the same general direction you are and schedule a 30 minute meeting once a month to share what each of you has learned since your last meeting. Build in an element of accountability to stay committed and maintain momentum.
As you share your three big things that you plan to accomplish, you will start to notice ways that you can be helpful to each other.
Business development is a project that never ends. It's a process, like creativity, and if you want to grow your business, you need to focus on it and have a system to make it happen each week.
How to Use Whole Brain Business Development to Create and Close More Opportunities, with Karim Nehdi
00:21:45
Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How can we use our cognitive diversity to create and close more deals?
What if you could read the minds of your customers and predict their response in advance? That would be an incredibly powerful business development skill.
The first step is understanding yourself and where your preferences lie. For Mo, he fell into the experimental/analytical spectrum and knowing that helped him understand what was really on his mind and how he approached life.
Your unique thinking style comes with strengths but also potential blindspots. Your default thinking may be leading you in the wrong direction for a deal, and if you never look back or get into the habit of thinking about your thinking, you will keep making the same mistakes.
Once you know what your thought process is like, you can use that as a model to consider how a prospect might be thinking. Think about one of your most important customers and take a guess about what they might be thinking about in terms of what you are offering.
If they are a big picture experimental thinker, maybe they are looking for something more innovative. If they are more relational thinkers, maybe they want to know they are going to be taken care of and are really concerned about what everyone else thinks. If they are structural thinkers, they are probably hyper-focused on the details and whether the offer will deliver exactly what they need. If they are analytical thinkers, they can be very price sensitive and looking for the greatest measurable ROI for them.
Understanding the different types of buyers can allow you to position your product or service around what their needs might be.
Don’t assume that people are on the same wavelength as you and ask the question about what they need.
There are certain ways of thinking that tend to manifest more often in certain industries. Analytical thinkers like actuaries are probably all about the bottom line and being efficient in their communication. Structural thinkers are probably all about the details. Relational thinkers may ask you about your personal life and will probably engage with you beyond verbal communication. Experimental thinkers will ask a lot of questions to try to connect the dots, and you might see them work out their thought process in the conversation.
Going Back In Time, What Maria Kelly Would Say To Her Younger Self
00:20:41
Mo asks Maria Kelly: If you could record a video around business development and give it to your younger self, what would it say?
The short answer would be to record Mo’s training. The longer answer is to start thinking about business development much earlier. Do not be afraid to reach out and ask for advice.
Over the last 12 months, Maria has read so many books that would have helped her tremendously when she was younger.
Highly skilled specialists often struggle with asking for advice, but it’s one of the most powerful things you can do to create bonds with people.
The more you communicate, the more things come your way. Asking people for advice makes people feel good, and other things can come up during the conversation that can change the way you think.
One of the ways that Maria had built relationships with clients was by asking them their advice on who she should hire and they loved the idea of having input. The worst that can happen is that the other person will thank you for thinking of them but they’re too busy to help.
Start with something small that doesn’t require too much of the other person, or by asking someone you are fairly confident will say yes no matter what. When you’re trying a new skill, start small and start safe.
If you have a business strategy that you aren’t sure of, reach out to your clients and run it by them first. It shows that you value them as a client and their opinion on what you do.
There are a lot more opportunities than you think that don’t fit into the traditional client opportunity conversation box. Just being human is a simple thing anyone can do. Unstructured moments used to happen naturally in the past, but it’s okay to go out of your way to try and create more of those moments.
Business development is a learnable skill, and the sooner you embrace it the more it will impact your career.
Embrace who you are and bring that to the business development table, because that is your strongest tool. Your authentic self is the foundation for all the other business development skills.
Mitch Joel Outlines The Three Step Digital Marketing Framework That Creates Consistent Growth
00:57:40
Mitch Joel shares the power of creating digital assets and how his simple framework for creating digital content can start off as just a drip and end up creating waves within your professional ecosphere. Learn how to pick the right communication format for you, how to create content in a way that’s unique to you and can’t be replicated by someone else, and how to build an audience that wants to hear from you each week by publishing consistently.
Mo asks Mitch Joel: What is your big idea for getting better at retention and growth?
Whether it’s digital or not, it’s all about relationships and relationships are built on the stories you tell and how you deliver on them.
Most people tend to market themselves with promises instead of with their overall story. The ethos of the Madmen era of advertising still permeates the way many professionals think.
You don’t have to be personal, you just have to be personable. That’s the story that is going to connect with the right kinds of customers, which is something that you need to be focused on.
As professionals, we all have to figure out what kind of content we are going to create. It can come in whatever form you like, whether that’s audio, video, or written. The content you create should have a bullseye that you’re aiming for within the Triangle of Attention.
Even if your approach or niche isn’t unique, you can still bring your unique voice to the table to make your brand stand out.
Human beings prefer regularity. Content you create should follow an editorial calendar instead of being posted whenever you happen to feel like it. Content should be scheduled regularly and you need to stick with the schedule.
Seth Godin refers to this as the “Drip Strategy.” Content is a drip and if you create enough drips they become a ripple, the ripple creates waves, and the waves fill the ocean.
The vast majority of the content you create will garner virtual crickets but cumulatively over time it creates a sense of presence, social proof, and credibility.
Mo asks Mitch Joel: How would you advise high end professionals to create and close more deals?
Go and follow Jeffrey Gettemer and subscribe to his newsletter. Anything Mitch has learned about sales was picked up from Jeffrey.
Essentially, a lot of sales is about relationship building, storytelling, not being boring, and not being caught up in our own world. Instead it is about focusing on what the prospect wants.
One of the biggest mistakes in sales is thinking exclusively about your own goals and quotas, when having the vision of what the person across the table needs is where the opportunity is.
Jeffrey once told the story of how his father always came home after work and voraciously wrote notes about companies and individuals and ideas so that he could better sell to them. The people who are outworking you or outselling you are just out-homeworking you.
Even though Mitch is no longer in the agency business, he still collects any articles or content he finds that would be relevant to someone and sends it to them. This isn’t done to derive immediate value but it works well as a connection point and relationship builder.
Don’t link-spam people. This approach is a strategy of gifting and is a customized, one-to-one touchpoint.
There is a lot of power derived when you do things like this authentically and from the heart.
Mo asks Mitch Joel: What’s your best advice for professionals to deepen long-term relationships?
People will not leave a relationship, even if they are paying you more than someone else, if they like you. Get people to like you in a way that’s authentic and genuine and clearly has their best interests at heart.
Don’t identify as a dinosaur. Excuses like “I can’t understand this” or “I don’t do social” are holding you back. We are all dealing with fatigue and overwork, but having the dinosaur mindset is a choice.
Technology has made content and communication very easy to accomplish and inexpensive to implement. There are no excuses.
Take an hour and learn how a piece of technology or app works so that you can do it yourself. Mitch may get old and grey, but he will never become a dinosaur.
Networking is great for creating and deepening relationships. Proactively fill your calendar with ways to connect with new people. As an example, Mitch takes his morning walks on Instagram and invites people to “walk” with him.
Networking has to be something that you’re doing all the time.
Mo asks Mitch Joel: How do we hack our own proactive habits to succeed?
We all make time for the things that are important to us. As we’ve seen from the pandemic, we can fill our schedules with anything and feel really busy. The only way to do anything really well is to make time for it.
Your priorities won’t show up in your to-do list, they show up in your calendar.
Scheduling is not Mitch’s main way to track his time because he prefers not being stressed out by a strict or full calendar. An alternative to scheduling the most important things is the Jerry Seinfeld approach of putting an X on the calendar when you’ve accomplished the one thing you wanted to get done that day, and then try not to break the chain.
Start light and start easy. Mitch found himself struggling to get into books during the pandemic so he committed to reading just five pages a day. Little incremental wins make it more likely you’ll do more and can lead to even bigger wins throughout the day.
When it comes to growing a book of business, Mitch’s advice is to focus on your zone of genius and say no to things that don’t fit within that, then be the best you can be. Be clear on who you serve and what you do, and say no to everything else.
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Mitch Joel.
Most professionals don’t yet understand the power of digital communication and thought starters.
By creating those digital assets you start to become attractive. People start sharing and want more of your content, and those people become predisposed to working with you.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what your expertise is, you have a brand and you have things you want people to know about you.
Pick a medium of communication that works for you, then identify your Triangle of Attention. What are three things that are unique to you that you can share information about?
Pick a publishing schedule that’s consistent and stick with it. Our brains love patterns and consistency is the key.
The format and style depends on you and what you’re comfortable with. You don’t have to create long form podcasts if that doesn’t fit your style. If you’re not sure what your style might be, ask yourself whether you would be excited to create something like that.
Look at news and current events through the lens of your Triangle of Attention. This becomes the basis for your unique voice.
Once you have those first two things established, pick a publishing cadence and stick to it. Deadlines can have the additional benefit of forcing you to act and become better over time.
This digital marketing strategy is a great way to build your book of business because digital assets keep paying off over time and most professionals are not doing enough in this arena right now.
How to Use Customer Experience and Marketing to Deepen Relationships, with Jay Baer
00:10:55
Mo asks Jay Baer: What is your best advice on deepening relationships?
The more transactional you think the relationship is, the more transactional it’s going to feel. If your motive is based on getting paid, you’re not going to develop deep and rich relationships.
The best way to go about building relationships that matter is to build relationships that you want to have on their own. If you get paid, that’s great. If not, that’s okay, too.
Be there before the sale. Build the right relationships now, even if you have nothing to sell or are not the right answer for them. Someday you might be.
Most people suck at business development because they are not patient. Have conversations with people that are not about business and eventually they may lead to a commercial deal down the road.
If you’re trying to figure out what relationships to build today, it should be the relationships that you might try to monetize in 2022.
If you want to build deeper, more valuable relationships that will eventually yield victories, it is your responsibility to add all the value to the relationships.
Business development is like practicing your serve, you should just keep sending value and adding to the relationship.
Who you are is infinitely more interesting than what you do. You have to add your personality into your interactions with people if you want them to remember you. It’s okay to treat people like people.
How can you add value to someone if you don’t know what that person cares about outside of business? Do the work to get to know the person.
It’s very hard to tell if a professional is 20% smarter or better, but it’s really easy to tell if they genuinely care.
James Clear on Why Habits Are the Foundation of Business Development Success - Encore Presentation
01:12:54
James Clear, author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, shares the importance of creating a system of habits that makes reaching your goals simple. Mo applies the principles of Atomic Habits directly to the world of business development and shows you how starting small can create huge results in your business.
This is an encore presentation of an episode that aired on June 11, 2020.
James Clear recounts the story of the high school baseball bat incident, how he realized that something had gone horribly wrong and how he found himself fighting for his life.
People are building habits all the time, but when your life is completely changed by a traumatic injury, you have to start as small as possible in order to rebuild them. Scaling down to what James could manage was how he was able to regain a sense of control over the life that he’d lost.
You don’t have control over the random events that come your way, but you do have control over how you respond to those things and that usually comes down to your habits.
Most people start with one foot in expertise and become great at what they do but once they reach the next level of success, they find themselves in a completely different world. This can often lead to them feeling defeated since they aren’t as skilled in the new area.
Goals are helpful for setting a direction or a filter but they come with a lot of drawbacks. Your goal is your desired outcome, but your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. If there is ever a gap between your system and your goal, your daily habits will always win. Whatever results you have right now are by definition the byproduct of the system you’ve been running.
It’s common in business for people to focus on the position or outcome, like doubling revenue or leads, but it’s more important to look at the system that’s running and the trajectory that business systems are driving towards.
We want our results to change, but it’s not the results that need to change, it’s the habits that precede the result that need to change. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Goals are useful as check-ins, but more time should be invested into the system of habits that lead to the outcome you want.
The Snowball system’s structure of lead and lag measures is very similar. Everybody is running systems whether they realize it or not. The questions you need to ask yourself are “How do I design a good system?” and “Which habits should I build?” This is where BIG goals come in to send you in the right direction.
There are three main things that impact your outcomes in life. The first is luck, the second is your choices/strategy, and the third is your system of habits and behaviour. When you master the last two, you increase the surface area for good luck to come your way.
People will often conflate the outcome they want to achieve with the person that they want to be. James believes you should shift the focus to the identity you desire instead of the goal because the real reason habits matter is that they can shape your sense of self. True behavior change is really identity change.
Another way of reshaping your identity is to reframe your goal into a question. Instead of trying to close more deals, ask yourself what a successful sales person would do and then use that to select the action that moves you in the right direction.
Questions are superior to advice because advice is contextual and situations change. Life is dynamic and advice will not always fit the circumstances. Identity-based questions guide you based on the situation.
There are four fundamental things that increase the odds of getting a habit to stick. The first is to make your good habits obvious and easy to see. The second is to make them attractive and appealing. The third is to make them easy and convenient. The fourth is to make your habits satisfying and associated with a positive emotion. If you want to break a bad habit, just invert those four.
When it comes to business development, we should look for one-time actions we can take that will help the cause every day from that point on to help mitigate the roller coaster that businesses tend to ride most of the time.
A lot of business development is done through a screen. Is there an app or a tool that you can use to make business development more obvious and prime yourself and your environment for that use?
James talks about the idea of the Temptation Bundle, where you combine a task that you know you should do with a task that you want to do in order to encourage the more important action.
Don’t let one piece of silence prevent you from following up. A failure should not be desired but it should be planned for. When following up, there will also be people who ignore your efforts, but by writing down your next follow-up in your calendar, you will be many times more likely to keep following up.
Life has a series of seasons and your habits should be different depending on the season of life you’re in. The same idea can be applied to your career. When you reach a new level it will probably require new habits in order to succeed.
As your career progresses, typically, your responsibility increases. When your responsibility increases your ability to say no to things and to prioritize also needs to increase. Saying no to something is only saying no to one thing, but saying yes to something means saying no to everything else. Everything comes with a trade-off.
If you’re going through a change of season in your career or your life, it may be the perfect time to reread Atomic Habits. The process of building habits is essentially rebuilding and getting started over and over as your life changes.
In business development, the goal is not to be the absolute best in the world, it’s just to be a little bit better than your competition. Business is mostly a winner-take-all proposition so put yourself in a position to make more shots and improve your craft, and each day you will be more likely to win.
Start with doing something small every single day when you don’t know where to begin. Any goal you have can be broken down into a two-minute chunk that will help you master the art of showing up. A habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up and expand it into something more.
One of the most motivating feelings for the human mind is seeing progress. A simple strategy to improve your business development habits is to create a way to visualize your efforts even if you don’t get any direct feedback. A visual cue is a powerful way to see your progress and increase the odds of you keeping pushing forward.
This episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue is the next in our series about how you can write a book and use it to take your business to the next level. I am joined by Jeff Goins, one of the best personal editors or collaborators out there. He’s here to share more information on the type of work he does, how to write a book even if you’re busy, and how to take a good book and make it great. We’re also diving into how you can hire a collaborator and create something that you’re really proud of!
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Key tips to get your book written - even if you don’t have time
What a collaborator does and how they can help you take your book to the next level
The three things you want to integrate when creating your book to make an impact
The different roles people play in the book creation process
How not to publish your book
How to use sticky statements that will make your book stand out
The way to start writing your book before you actually write a book
The one thing to do if you want to really perfect your book
The difference between good and great work when it comes to writing a book
I hope you found some value in this episode with Jeff! He is so talented at what he does and the books he creates are changing the world.
Ron Friedman on Finding Success By Learning to Reverse Engineer Greatness
01:23:56
Ron Friedman shares the principles of Decoding Greatness and reveals why the stories we are told about success are wrong. Learn how to reverse engineer greatness in any field by becoming a collector, how to create a scoreboard that leads to success, and a simple technique for hacking your habits and guaranteeing that you improve your skills over time.
Mo asks Ron Friedman: How can the audience get better at growing their book of business, their relationships, and their career?
The big idea behind Decoding Greatness is that the stories we were told about success were wrong. We were told that either people are born with special talents or that greatness comes from years of practice. The third story that most people don’t know is that those at the top of a profession have most often mastered the skill of reverse engineering.
Reverse engineering is simply taking the best examples within your field and working backward to see how it was achieved and what can be applied to what you’re working on. Methods vary depending on the field you are in.
Regardless of what field you are in, having the reverse engineering mindset of looking to decode how something is created is the key to getting better.
Become a collector. Most of the great people in the world started off as collectors before they were creators. Finding greatness requires seeing greatness in others. If you see something that you want to achieve, collect examples of those things and you will begin to identify the patterns that are different from other things. Finding the differences is the first step to figuring out what makes someone or something unique.
Asking great questions is another method of discovering the differences when you have the opportunity to speak to your model directly. A mindset of naive curiosity is one of the fastest ways to allow people to open up when they are with you.
Contrast this reverse engineering method with the idea of practice makes perfect. Improvement through isolation is a failing strategy. You can’t practice an idea you’ve never considered. The real path to greatness is having a systematic approach to learning from the best and applying it to your work.
Simply copying someone else’s formula will probably not work for you. Their value proposition may not apply to your industry or the audience expectations may have shifted. The key is to evolve what you are modeling to make it unique to you and novel to the people viewing it.
One way of doing that is by combining two or three examples of greatness and taking the elements that resonate with you to create the best possible version.
Mo asks Ron Friedman: How can we create and close more big opportunities and business?
We know from the research that anything you want to improve on you need to keep score of. In other words, you need to track your numbers.
Simply relying on closed deals is not enough. There are way more metrics that you can track that are better indicators of progressive improvement. You have to identify the metrics that indicate you are doing a good job in your field and track them over time.
When you track those numbers the metrics become motivating. You tend to be more mindful of what you decide to do and it exposes wasteful effort.
We are sensitive to numbers evolutionarily speaking. Numbers give us crucial information that we need to succeed in many different areas of life.
Only tracking the lagging indicators like deals closed is only half the picture and they aren’t directly in your control. You need to track leading indicators that are in your control as well.
Your scoreboard needs a balance between short-term and long-term goals. This applies to the overall success of your career, but extends into your personal life and relationships as well. We want to avoid over-optimization of a single metric to the detriment of everything else. Metrics can be a mix of both quantity and quality.
In terms of metrics that you should focus on, you need to work backward from your target audience. Not all prospects are created equal. We would all be wiser to think about the one person that you want to work with the most and how to replicate them.
Subjective metrics can still be beneficial, but even within those metrics there are things to drill down on to identify what makes the metric important. In the case of meaningful conversations, did both parties speak equally? Was there self-disclosure from both sides? When you compare the ordinary to the extraordinary you will be able to identify some objective metrics that you can aim for that will enable you to be more successful.
Mo asks Ron Friedman: What can we do to deepen our relationships using all of the knowledge in Decoding Greatness?
Use your relationships as test markets. Test markets are often used by successful entrepreneurs to fine-tune their ideas before they go to market. This enables you to take a lot more risk and test more things before going big.
When it comes to deepening your relationships with potential clients, ask for advice on a potential approach you’ve been considering. Avoid asking for feedback because requesting advice primes them to think about the potential ways you could improve, and you get great feedback at the same time.
People love to feel like they can contribute and their opinion is valued. Ask for advice.
In relationships, people want to be valued, respected, and appreciated, and what better way to honor someone than asking for their input on something that you can improve.
Positioning yourself as better than your clients will work up to a point, but if you want to deepen your relationship and get them invested in your success, asking for advice is the way to do that.
There is also the advantage of getting the perspective of someone that you can’t see on your own specifically because of your level of expertise. Advice can open up your mind to ideas that you haven’t considered and can lead the other person to suggest people that would be interested in that offering.
Start a collection of people who communicate well and deepen relationships effectively. We all have people in our lives that we can emulate and create a collection that will allow you to decode and discover meaningful patterns.
When communicating, start with what’s important to the other person and not what’s important to you. If you have established a scoreboard, you can also create a checklist to measure your communications against.
Mo asks Ron Friedman: How do we hack our own habits to be successful?
When most of us think about improving our skills we tend to think about a practice that’s narrowly defined in the present. If we look at those who are at the top of their field, their definition includes the past, present, and future.
Looking to past experiences by keeping a five-year journal is how you get an extra perspective. Reviewing our previous day alongside that same day one year before will give you additional insights, and the five-year journal automates the practice.
Additional benefits of the journal are that it improves your memory and helps you recognize how often your fears are overblown in the moment, and this gives you more confidence to handle challenges going forward.
Research shows that if all you do is write down what you learned today, your performance will improve by up to 25% on the following try.
Reflective practice is a method that will generate improvement over time.
Practicing in the future is exemplified by imagery. Athletes imagine their performance in advance using all five senses. Experts that use this technique improve faster and extend to all professions.
One of the best uses of imagery is imagining that you stumble and how you recover. This teaches you that whatever comes up you can get better. This technique helps you front-load decisions and allows you to simply execute in the moment.
If you write down what can go wrong in a meeting and how you would handle it, your confidence will go through the roof and it will allow you to be more present in the conversation.
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Ron Friedman.
Decoding is extremely powerful. Mo has had great success taking models that worked for another company and decoding it and then applying it in his own way, and has noticed that without a concrete vision or model to emulate, the odds of success go way down.
If you want to decode greatness, start by becoming a collector. Having only one model can be restrictive. Combining the elements that work across models can create a synthesis of the best examples and lead to a better end result.
Track your behaviors because there is no way to be successful and feel great about it without tracking something of your own.
We love numbers and are intrinsically drawn to them as they indicate success in life at a very fundamental level.
If all you are looking at is lagging indicators, you won’t feel motivated in the short-term and it can lead to feeling defeated. We need to pull the metrics back to things that we can control instead of focusing on the outcome. What can you do today to be just a little bit better at what you do?
The cumulative effect of your leading indicators is long-term success. If you don’t track the metrics that matter most you can end up making missteps for months without even realizing it.
When it comes to business development, think about your performance all the time. One of the benefits of the pandemic is the ability to record your Zoom calls with potential clients and review the conversation. You can look at the number of questions you asked, when the other person leaned in or checked out, and more. Practice in the past and review your past performance on a regular basis.
Practice in the present and write down what you’ve accomplished today. Having a meeting with yourself to review your progress is incredibly valuable.
Practice in the future. Focus on the imagery of the elements that are important to business development meetings. Anticipate what might happen, what questions you might receive, and what might go wrong and this will give you the confidence to deliver effectively.
Getting Clients Engaged By Building Everything Together
00:12:28
This week we are talking about what I like to call “Building Everything Together.” Essentially this is how you’re going to co-create the proposals, the contracts, and the way you’re going to do business with your client. It’s called the IKEA effect, and it’s incredibly powerful.
Today we will be talking about
1. The optimal way to use the IKEA effect with your clients 2. The four incremental yeses you’re looking for 3. What to do if they’re not engaged
The moral of the story is that it doesn't matter the role, the title, or the level of the person in an organization. If working with you is important to them, they will engage in building everything together. If working with you is not important to them, they will tell you they don't want to engage or they'll show it through their actions. Don't judge people by their words, judge them by their actions.
If you engage in this idea of the building everything together process or the science called the IKEA effect, you will have massive success because you get out and you quit pursuing. If they do engage, you know you've got something meaty and you're going to have the impact that you want to have.
In the next few episodes, I’m going to show you how to engage in those four big yeses that you want and so much more.
Henning Streubel's Favorite Business Development Strategy
00:16:19
Mo asks Henning Streubel: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG Training or Snowball System?
Henning’s favorite idea is the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. It’s vital to understand how you, your team, and your prospects think.
Henning is an analytical thinker, and understanding this gives him greater insight into how he can communicate with another person who can compliment that with their own thought preferences.
Henning took his team through the HBDI process to get a good idea of how his team thinks and where there might be any gaps. This allows the team to cover all the quadrants.
Externally, Henning has a few questions that he asks to get an idea of how a person thinks. Within 30 minutes he usually has an idea on the other person’s thinking style and can start tailoring his communication to cover the aspects that are most important to them.
When it comes to an analytical thinker, Henning would lay out the numbers and the facts.
For a procedural thinker, he would lay out the next steps in the process of working together to give them execution certainty and confidence in Henning’s ability to get the job done.
For an empathic thinker, he would focus on the tools and skills that the client team can learn by working with them and the change management that will help people be successful.
For a strategic thinker, Henning starts with the purpose of the work. He creates a future perspective and vision around how the work will change the company with a transformative impact.
The work is done between the first meeting and the last meeting. This is why building it together is so important. Bringing your client into the development of the solution and building their thoughts and concerns into it makes it far more sustainable.
on.bcg.com/henning - Use the envelope icon on this page to get in touch with Henning directly
18 Apr 2022
Read Davis on Producing – Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:09:28
Mo asks Read Davis: When was the moment you decided to get great at business development?
You can learn to compete and life is about competition in Read’s mind. There isn’t always a winner and loser in every situation, but measuring success is based on the scoreboard you’re looking at.
As Read moved into his career out of college, his scoreboard changed. One fateful night while working alongside the CFO and the General Manager, they gave him a piece of advice that changed the way he thought about business.
If you really want success and to own your career, you have to think about being in the business of the business. For Read, that meant selling and having an impact on the growth of the business.
Sales and business development transcend everything. It gives you a skill that can be transferred anywhere and if you can get comfortable being uncomfortable you will always be able to find a job.
Being successful in production is a long-game grind. You have to do the time and the work to get the snowball rolling. Relationships are built over time and the most successful salespeople are relationship-oriented.
There is a numbers game in every business. Sales and relationships are about solving problems, and the more people you meet and get to know the more opportunities you have to make a sale.
You need to invest in the process for it to be able to pay off.
How To Tell Great Stories to Grow Your Business with Tim Grahl
00:46:29
One of the top skills that people need to learn in business is how to tell great stories. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I have one of the world's experts on this topic, Tim Grahl. He has one foot in deep expertise and one foot in building a book of business, just like all of you so he is the perfect person to talk to. He’s diving into the details of what types of stories you need and how to fine-tune them so you can use them to grow your business.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Helping people feel like the hero in their own story
The types of stories you need to have ready to use
Overcoming objections with a story
The power of a professional origin story
The five commandments of storytelling
Tips for fine-tuning your stories
Bringing emotion into your stories
The importance of knowing your wrong
How Tim stays on track
Having a professional origin story, a testimonial story, and a story for overcoming objections is so powerful when it comes to growing your business. I hope these tips today from Tim will help you prepare some stories that you can use to grow your business and your career.
If you are interested in writing better stories, you can get a free copy of Story Grid 101 at storygrid101.com. You can also visit storygrid.com/books to check out Tim’s books.
Going Back In Time, What Andrew Cogar Would Say To His Younger Self
00:17:59
Mo asks Andrew Cogar: If you could record a video around business development and send it to your younger self, what would it say?
Andrew would tell himself two things. Focus on building meaningful, real relationships as early as possible with as many respected peers and people in your industry as you can.
The second thing is to figure out what drives you, what you find value in, and what work is meaningful to you.
Doing the work early can save you a lot of time and there is no reason you can’t start sooner.
Young people often have a hesitation to reach out but there is no downside. More often than not, they can connect you with someone else who can help even if they say no. There really is nothing to lose.
There are tons of people out there that want to mentor someone with energy and enthusiasm. Potential mentors want to help high achievers.
Start with good questions. The more you can question yourself, the more accurate and insightful answers you will come across. Asking those questions leads to a better dialogue with yourself and the mentors you’re asking for advice from.
Journaling is a key practice that Mo wishes he had started earlier. Reviewing your progress once a week is an easy and simple step that keeps you accountable and honest.
Having a tool to take a mental inventory of where you want to go and to remind yourself of your big picture goals, it allows you to let go of the small things and stay focused.
Write down the relationships you would like to go after.
What Business Development REALLY Means, According to Andrew Robertson, Mark Harris, and Linda Klein
00:47:45
Mo asks Andrew Robertson: What is your personal definition of business development?
Business development at its best is win/win/win. Your business wins, the client wins, and thirdly, the client is winning so much that they become your best business development ambassador.
Raving fans turn into your own personal sales force.
Focusing on the win for the client secures the win for the business. If your client wins enough, they become predisposed to become a raving fan, but you still have to ask for it.
Do something for them that gets them something of value and gets you even more. Don’t assume it will happen automatically.
First, recognize that the person you are working with is a person and not just a job title. They have interests and frustrations, and when you understand that there is something you can engage with together.
Dinner is a great opportunity to connect with someone outside of the confines and constraints of the work. You can also find a time to accompany them on another aspect of their work and learn more about what they do and what they care about in a way that’s not structured like a meeting.
The best conversations you can have with a client are the ones where you do 20% of the talking. Figure out questions to act as a stimulus and get them talking.
There is value and benefit for people in just having the opportunity to talk.
Mo asks Mark Harris: What is your personal definition of business development?
Business development means something different to everybody. For Mark, it’s all about helping people understand what their needs are (teaching) and then once you find that out it’s helping them find the solution they need.
Mark focuses on one phrase when going into the first meeting with someone, specifically being “humbly curious”. He’s simply looking to understand what motivates someone and where they are coming from, and what’s going to help them.
Nobody wants to be sold, but everybody likes to buy, especially from people they like. Focusing on the sale is a short-term strategy.
Sometimes the right thing is to not sell something. If things aren’t a good fit now but might be later, being upfront and telling the prospect the truth is how you can build trust and empathy and secure a valuable long-term relationship.
Ask as many questions as you can. When you can train your mind to ask questions and be humbly curious, the world is your oyster and you can bring value to that organization at all times.
Mo asks Linda Klein: What is your personal definition of business development?
Adding value to a client’s business by solving the problem. Service professionals often only look at a client’s issue through the lens of their own expertise, but that’s not the way to grow a business.
Asking for the sale before solving the problem (or diagnosing the problem) isn’t going to work.
Linda looks for ways to solve client problems that keep them from growing their own business. Sometimes that means referring the client to someone else when the issue is outside her area of expertise.
Linda starts solving the problem before a transaction has occurred. We can sense when someone is trying to sell us before any value has really been added to the relationship and it usually makes us want to run away.
Go into the first meeting simply to get to know somebody instead of trying to close the sale. When you help someone achieve their goals, you feel great and you increase the odds of them turning into a paying client.
When following up, think about who you could connect the person with and what the person said in the initial meeting that you continue the conversation with.
If you have taken your time to get to know the industry your prospect is in, you will know where the pain points are and have opportunities to help.
The number one thing you can do to be proactive in building relationships is writing down your top five to ten people that are important to your career and using that to make sure you're constantly being helpful.
Jonathan Reckford on Building Foundations – Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:16:30
Mo asks Jonathan Reckford: When did you realize you wanted to grow something big and make an impact?
Jonathan had a lot of great role models growing up, with his grandmother being one of the first women in Congress. She would always ask Jonathan what he was going to do to be useful, a mindset that he eventually adopted and grew into.
Jonathan assumed he would follow her footsteps into politics and law, but quickly realized after college that law wasn’t what he wanted to do.
He later talked his way into a job at Goldman Sachs, received a grant and moved to South Korea to work for the Seoul Olympic committee, and ended up working with the rowing team as their coach for a few years.
That experience allowed him to reorient his perspective and after returning home, Jonathan came back with a mission. He went into business school and spent the next 15 years helping large organizations grow.
After that time in the private sector, Jonathan went to India on short-term mission trips. Seeing the challenges and suffering in rural India touched his heart and he realized the power of small interventions in dire situations.
Jonathan began focusing on helping churches grow and contributing to the mission of alleviating international poverty, ultimately culminating in working for Habitat for Humanity nearly 17 years ago.
You can’t always connect the dots going forward, but when you look back you see how everything got you to where you are now. Jonathan’s experiences in his career lend themselves perfectly to his current role as the leader of Habitat for Humanity.
Work on the ‘who’ before the ‘what’. Build your character and skills instead of looking for some grand career plan. No matter what you do in your 20s, consider it continuing your education.
As long as you’re learning and aligned, you will eventually find your vocation where you have an impact that lines up with your passion and skills.
Habitat for Humanity is thinking big for the future and is focused on making markets work more effectively to create just societies where really everyone can access safe, decent, affordable housing.
Really bold leaders are ones that reframe everything.
If you have the right mission for the problem you're trying to solve, you'll gain the power you need to get there. If you're focused on gaining power, that's ultimately going to be self-defeating.
Start with crafting a story around why what you’re doing is making the world a better place and get clarity on your true purpose.
Brian Caffarelli on the Subtle Art and Exacting Science of Business Development
01:20:15
Brian Caffarelli shares his decades of experience in sales and consulting and what he learned about the art and science that is business development. Learn why becoming a guide that inspires trust is one of the most important things you can do to sell more, why success in business development comes down to good habits, and why setting expectations at the beginning is crucial to making the right sale to the right client.
Mo asks Brian Caffarelli: When was the moment that you realized that business development was something you wanted to focus on?
Brian’s first job out of college was in selling automobiles as a wholesaler to dealerships. Everything began for Brian with his first sale, and how that came about because of developing a relationship with another human being.
Seeing salespeople that were successful and respected helped Brian navigate what it took to grow in a sales career. So much of success is simply about being in the environment and paying attention.
If you want to grow your skills, start with the fundamentals of communication and psychology. It’s also important to apply what you learn along the way instead of just taking it in.
Consider what you’ve done well and what you could have done better.
Translating his business development skills to a virtual environment is something that Brian is working on, as well as working on learning new things and being open to seeing things differently.
A recent study revealed the Learned Dogmatism effect and how people tend to become more closed-minded the more expert they become in a specific domain. One of the keys to Brian’s success is striving against that and always being willing to learn.
Mo asks Brian Caffarelli: What is your personal definition of business development?
Brian likes to think of business development as the art and science of guiding the buyer through their journey to an informed and confident decision.
Just because you know the science, that doesn’t mean you’ll be great at business development. It’s equal parts the art of empathy and flexibility, and science of habits and communication.
Mountain climbing guides are great metaphors for business development. Really good salespeople are helping people reach their own personal summit and get what they need to experience from the mountain.
The defining characteristic of a guide is the ability to inspire trust. Trust comes before the sale. You need to be able to see ahead of corners for your buyers, and to challenge their thinking where appropriate.
The challenge for the guide is in focusing on what the buyer needs over their own needs.
Work on the skills and behaviors that inspire trust in you and live your life with integrity so you are worthy of that trust. Study why people buy, because that is going to be your biggest point of leverage for creating a great buying experience.
Mo asks Brian Caffarelli: What is your favorite science, step, or strategy from the GrowBIG Training or Snowball System?
Whole brain thinking stands out the most to Brian. When trying to communicate, it’s easy to over index on the message and under index on the individual receiving the message. The Herrmann Brain Dominance model allows you to understand the preferences of the receiver so you can craft a message that will resonate with them.
Good questions are the prompt that people need to think out loud and identify the problems they are facing.
If you’re in a conversation with a prospect, one of your goals should be to reduce the amount of words that are open to interpretation. The more you know exactly what they are saying the better.
Success in business development often comes down to simply forming really good habits.
One habit that Brian works hard on is always finding something of value to the client that he holds most dear. This habit keeps them top of mind and helps him identify new opportunities for adding value.
Brian spends a half an hour each morning scanning for new research with another hour each Saturday.
Think like your buyer and make that habitual so that becomes the way you enter the conversation.
Mo asks Brian Caffarelli: Tell me of a business development story that you are really proud of.
Brian’s most proud of the lesson he learned from his story. Early in his career, Brian was part of a major sales effort with a world-class brand. Negotiations went very well until there was one intractable snag with the contract.
Brian learned that it wasn’t just about making a sale, it was about making a quality sale. Some clients aren’t right for your organization.
You will never regret the client you didn’t get, as much as the wrong client you did get.
Brian had to step up in two dimensions: In being with the buyer through all the steps of the process, and in bridging the gap between the seller’s needs and the buyer’s needs.
Shared expectations are important. You should be diligent around creating shared expectations before a sale is made so that everyone is on the same page and you can avoid making painful mistakes down the road.
If something isn’t a fit, it’s better to find that out sooner rather than later.
Mo asks Brian Caffarelli: If you could record a video around business development and send it back to your younger self, what would it say?
If you think selling is hard, buying is harder. Brian would want to tell his younger self that if he was more in tune and empathetic to the struggles of the buyer, sales wouldn’t be as hard.
When you feel stuck with sales, realize that the buyer is even more stuck.
To create a great buying experience, deconstruct as many of the little decisions that need to be made before the purchase decision. Get a sense of where you are in the process and the personal motivations of the other person for the stage they are at.
As the guide, it’s your job to help the buyer understand what the next step is and move them forward when they are ready.
Look into the past and see if your organization or you personally did something similar before. You might find challenges that were overcome and lessons that can be applied right now.
In the early stages of the buying journey, the buyer doesn’t necessarily realize the enormity or the complexity of the problem they are trying to solve. When trying to create demand, it’s problem knowledge and not product knowledge that moves the needle.
Empathy is the keyword. Buyers are trying to make a really hard decision and the better you understand the buying challenges the more likely you are to being able to solve their problem.
We all have teams. We all have team habits. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I sat down with Charlie Gilkey, the expert in team habits! Charlie is the author of the book Team Habits and he’s here to help us understand how truly impactful good internal and external team habits can be. Don’t let the simplicity of team habits fool you into thinking that you don’t need to prioritize it. Charlie’s showing us how to lean into interpersonal power and co-agency and work better together going forward.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The difference between individual habits and team habits
The three dimensions of power at work
The 8 different types of team habits
How to improve your client team habits
The ripple effect of changing team habits
Why your relationships are key to creating habits that work
Tips for coming together to find out what works
The core team habits that truly matter
Growth activities that can improve our internal team habits
The right way to do goal-setting
Why everything leads back to making an impact
How to use a Media Map to create habits for where to communicate
Ways to make sure you’re always on the path to excellence
I hope you enjoyed learning about team habits with Charlie! Remember, what's more important than whether you have alignment and everybody agrees on everything is whether you get together as a team and figure out how to get in alignment.
If you want to take the Team Habits quiz or learn more about creating team habits, head over to betterteamhabits.com.
Marty Fagan's Favorite Business Development Strategy
00:13:19
Mo asks Marty Fagan: When you think of GrowBig Training or the Snowball System, what's your favorite science, step, or story?
The Give to Get is the easy answer for Marty.
By utilizing the Give to Get, Marty’s team establishes a much stronger relationship with their customer and gets them bought in, drastically increasing the odds of landing the business.
You’re becoming a partner with your customer through the process by investing in them, and in return they often begin investing in you.
A Give to Get is essentially offering something of value to a prospect that you think they need before you are hired. This can take the form of thought leadership, connections, and more.
It has three criteria: it adds value for them, it’s relatively worth it, and it’s easy for you to do. The key to a successful Give to Get is that it leads to a next step and the prospect realizing that they can benefit from your expertise.
Get to a place where you agree on what success looks like, that mutual agreement is what leads to the next step and eventually the close.
With a Give to Get, you're both agreeing to something, and you're working on this in collaboration with each other. You're both investing time and effort into it and that's what ties it all together. Without both sides escalating the commitment level over time, there won’t be a future together.
Compared to a blind RFP, the Give to Get approach is almost ten times more effective at landing business.
This is our fifth and final episode on how to add value to your most important relationships. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I want to talk about types of measurement and accountability. You have to measure what you can control.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
How to disconnect from the outcome
Adding value without expecting anything in return
How to track what you can control
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you win when they reply back and say it was valuable. You win when you offer the value. This is so important but most people quit too soon. If you’re being authentic and offering value in unique ways, that will be received well the vast majority of the time. You will win and deepen the relationship.
If you want to go even deeper, make sure to check out my conversation with Ron Friedman linked below. We talked about how to hack your own habits by tracking things and I think you’ll really enjoy that conversation.
Bonneau Ansley on Sales – Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:12:17
Mo asks Bonneau Ansley: Tell me of the moment in your life when you realized that business development was something you wanted to focus on.
Bonneau knew he was going to be a sales guy at the early age of 16 when he was in highschool. He felt that school wasn’t really his thing, but people and classmates were. He started selling t-shirts and hats, which continued into college with his own clothing company, and he realized that selling was something that he clicked with.
It was in college where he was first exposed to real estate after taking a class that he became completely hooked on the subject. After college, selling real estate became the natural evolution for Bonneau.
Bonneau has done every facet of real estate including development and sales, with plenty of success and failure along the way. Cycles are common in real estate, and Bonneau has had to reinvent himself more than once.
Bonneau recalls the story of when he and his wife had lost everything to a house fire in 2004. The fire forced him to give himself a fresh start. As devastating something like a fire can be, it’s a catalyst for change in life.
Bonneau tries to reinvent himself every year. He works in a very competitive environment so his mindset is always centered around thinking big, doubling his business big. To double your business, you have to create habits that you didn’t do before, and implement those.
In Bonneau’s seventh year in business, they are on track to sell over $3 billion in sales this year.
It doesn’t have to take your house burning down or your business to fail with the banking collapse. It’s simply about having a mindset where you always look at what you need to do to do better every single year.
The Most Important Skill for Creating Incredible Growth
00:36:03
Mo Bunnell reveals the number one skill for creating incredible growth in your career and for deepening relationships in general. Learn the frameworks for asking great questions and how they create a triple win for you and your prospect, the six types of questions you can ask to go deeper and build trust and rapport with anyone, and the biggest mistake you need to avoid for great questions to be effective.
Asking Great Questions that Work Hand in Hand with Your Business Growth Strategy
Asking great questions gets you a triple win. The first being it creates an enjoyable experience for the other side. When people share information only they know (self-disclosing information), the pleasure center of their brain lights up.
The second win is that you also become more likable. As people answer great questions, talking more while you talk less, the more they associate you with feeling great.
The third win is that it allows you to become unique in the mind of the buyer. As they begin sharing, you are going to learn their priorities in their words. Being able to talk about what you do in the context of the other person’s goals and priorities is way more effective.
When at all possible, avoid going first. If you have to, make your intro brief and shift quickly to asking the other person about their goals. People are dying to share their perspective, give that opportunity to them.
You’re going to win the meeting if the other person talks more than you do.
Avoid showing up with a big and clunky Powerpoint, focusing on you. Get to the other person as quickly as possible and offer ways to be helpful.
How Asking Past & Future Related Questions Affects the Success of Your Business Growth Strategy
Make sure you’re getting the other side to share their personal perspective, something that only they know. Questions focused on the past and the future are great starting places for teasing out that information.
Past questions include: “What historical data should we use to benchmark the future improvements we’re talking about?”, “What’s your #1 learning from leading teams on initiatives like this from the past?”, “What’s the most important experience you’ve had that's gotten you to this role?”, “What would you say has historically been the most important characteristics of an external partner like us?”
Future questions get people thinking of ways they want to create value and advance things. Examples include: “What do you think this would look like if it was working well?”, “How much do you think we can improve that important metric you mentioned in three years?”, “How would people feel if we did it the way you would like?”, “What would your role look like if there were no restrictions on you?”, and “What’s the number one thing I can do to be helpful in following up?”
Avoid asking stock questions, they just reveal that you haven’t done your homework.
Customize the questions to show you are paying attention and care about the other person’s business.
Use This in Your Business Growth Strategy: Ask Elevating Questions During Sales Calls
Future questions ask people to articulate what they think a future should look like. Elevating questions explore the present at a high level.
Examples include: “How do you think your CEO sees this fitting in with your overall strategy?”, “What are the most important personal metrics for you this year, and how does this issue impact them?”, “What’s your favorite thing about your job right now?”, “If you had to choose some personal metrics right now that would elevate your profile and get you a big bonus, what would they be?”
For questions around a specific issue, you’re focusing on the opposite of elevate and paying more attention to today at a detailed level.
Examples include: “If you had to pick one process or step that was the most important to get right, what would it be?”, “If you could choose one quick win we could focus on and accomplish, what would it be?”, “What one person should we give some extra attention to in the meeting next week?”, and “What’s the number one thing we can improve in regards to our teams working together?”
These style of questions require you to do your homework, but if you can design a great question you will get the other person thinking deeply and helping them understand themselves even better.
You will probably only have the opportunity to ask four or five great questions over the course of an hour. Think deeply about the questions you want to ask.
How Connection Questions are Key to any Business Growth Strategy
Connection questions are all about lateral thinking and how things fit together. The goal is to use them to get hired, develop trust, and be helpful in general.
Examples include: “What other projects or teams might benefit from knowing what we’re considering?”, “What other external partners should we connect with to make things easier?”, “What connections can I make for you inside the company?”, “What kinds of updates would be most helpful for me to give you around the topic?”
The next category is more focused on what’s missing. Ironically, these kinds of questions are the most interesting and most commonly skipped.
Examples include: “What should we have discussed about this potential project but didn’t?”, “What other data should we begin to collect now so that we have a benchmark to prove success?”, “What kinds of people are you looking to meet?”, “What can I do to be helpful that we haven’t discussed yet?”
These sorts of questions are very thought provoking and great to drop into the middle of a meeting or near the end.
The trap to avoid is over indexing on your initial questions and not focusing on the questions you will use to wrap up the conversation.
Crush Your Business Growth Strategy by Avoiding Asking Prospects These Questions
Research has shown that for commonly used skills, we drastically overestimate our abilities. In one particular study, people’s average percentile ability in the test skill was 12%, but they rated themselves on average at 62%.
Asking great questions is the lynchpin.
Earned dogmatism is a mental heuristic that says that the more we view ourselves as an expert in an area, the more close minded we become.
The skills of curiosity and learning that got us our expertise wane over time unless we fight against the tendency. If you want to continue deepening relationships, you need to fight earned dogmatism by asking more questions instead of always talking about answers all the time.
Wake up every morning and try to think you don’t know everything about your craft so you’re open to continuing to learn. If you can walk into every conversation with the beginner’s mind, you have a chance to grow your skills and keep getting better.
“It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking.” Huang, Karen, et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 113, no. 3, 2017, pp. 430–452. - doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000097
How to Hack Our Own Habits to Accomplish More, with Nancy Duarte
00:12:43
Mo asks Nancy Duarte: How can we stay focused and continue on the growth path while we’re busy with delivery?
It’s definitely a challenge. You have to deliver your highest and best work in order to get repeat business, but you also have to spend a lot of energy on growth activities that are very different from delivery.
One of the things that Nancy noticed by eliminating all the clients that weren’t ideal for her organization was that it brought those two things closer together. Calendaring and blocking out specific time is also a good way to ensure those activities get done.
To identify their ideal clients, the first step was to create a profile. It involved coming up with the right rubrics to understand which companies had the highest sales potential and biggest opportunity for growth.
One of the most challenging roles is to be doing both delivery and sales at the same time. Care and honest communication is what will bring your clients back to you each year.
Asking questions like “How can we help our clients achieve even more than they think they could?” is important to identifying those opportunities. Nancy also looked at how deep the penetration was into each organization and synergy with other services that Nancy’s organization had to offer.
Looking at each client from a utopian/dystopian point of view was a helpful exercise as well.
Mastering Workplace Flexibility: Insights & Strategies for Retaining Top Talent with CEO and Author, Manar Morales
00:43:54
Is workplace flexibility the key to retaining top talent? In this episode, I sit down with Manar Morales, CEO of the Diversity & Flexibility Alliance and author of The Flexibility Paradigm, to tackle one of the biggest challenges leaders face today—how to make workplace flexibility work for everyone. As businesses navigate hybrid environments, employee retention struggles, and shifting cultural expectations, Manar shares why flexibility isn’t just a policy—it’s a business imperative.
We explore how flexibility drives productivity, engagement, and retention while debunking common myths that hold leaders back from embracing it. Through a five-step framework, we break down what organizations, teams, and individuals can do to implement sustainable, high-impact flexibility strategies. If you’ve ever wondered how to balance business needs with employee well-being, this episode is a must-listen!
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The unexpected why behind successful workplace flexibility
A common mistake leaders make that drives top talent away
How to structure flexibility so that it benefits both employees and businesses
The overlooked role of co-creation in designing flexible work models
Why some flexibility policies fail—and how to make sure yours doesn’t
A thought-provoking question that will reshape how you approach workplace culture
How flexibility can be the secret weapon for long-term competitive advantage
Workplace flexibility is not just a buzzword—it's a vital strategy for driving business success and retaining top talent. If you’re ready to dive deeper into the topic, be sure to pick up Manar Morales’ book The Flexibility Paradigm here. For more insights on how to create a flexible workplace that benefits both employees and businesses, visit the Diversity and Flexibility Alliance website at dfalliance.com. You can also connect with Manar directly via email at manar@dfalliance or on LinkedIn at Manar Morales.
The Business Development Story That Changed Everything for Scott Winter
00:13:51
Mo asks Scott Winter: Tell us of a time when you were doing something with business development that you are really proud of.
Scott was working with another firm years ago that used Interaction, and there was a big push to bring them on board as an expanded partner. It took many months and using a lot of the GrowBIG strategies to provide enough value and develop the relationship to the point where they said yes, and that client became one of Scott’s favorites to work with.
There was a tremendous growth in confidence for Scott, since he was not a natural salesperson, and that partnership revealed how important business development really is and how good he could be at creating valuable relationships.
There are four big incremental yes’s you need in order to build something together. You have to get agreement that the strategic fit is there, determine the practicality of what you’re going to do, get the team and all the stakeholders on board, and then get the “yes” on the financial aspects.
Accountability is a major component of Scott’s approach to business development. When he works with a client, he makes himself available to them and gets invested in their success instead of just moving on to the next sale.
Scott focuses on building trust and giving the client a personal commitment to see the project through.
Everything about the GrowBIG Training and Snowball System is about building long-term relationships.
Scott trusts in his team and his product, and that trust allows him to support his clients in their success. If you don’t stand behind your client and service, you’re never going to be able to sell to them again. It all comes down to trust.
How to Use the Mere Exposure Effect to Add More Value
00:06:00
In the last set of videos, we talked a lot about building strong relationships and we touched on adding value. This week, we are going to be diving into the topic of adding value even more and how you can have a long-term mindset when it comes to relationships. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, you’ll learn about the Mere Exposure Effect and how to add value to your most important relationships regularly.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The Mere Exposure Effect
Likeability and frequency matter
The importance of having systems for outreach
It’s important that you create a system of outreach to identify the most important people you want to have relationships with and reach out to them. You don’t want to just wait for life to send people your way, you want to take control of your relationships so that you can add the most value.
Think about how you can use the Mere Exposure Effect and have some kind of unexpected, unpaid outreach where you’re really helpful to somebody.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Mere Exposure Effect, make sure to check out the Wikipedia page I linked below. It has a lot of interesting information on it.
The Science of Positioning: How to Stand Out in the Mind Of Your Client
00:40:57
How do you position yourself uniquely so that you can win more often? In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m diving into the topic of positioning. I have found that this is very rarely taught but it’s a critical skill to make yourself unique in the mind of the buyer. I’m sharing tips for creating your three key messages, how to become more memorable, pro tips for communicating, and so much more so that you can truly stand out amongst the competition.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The law of positioning
Why people don’t care about your accolades
The three words to use when talking to a client
Why three is the perfect number
Why you need to include three reasons a client should work with you
The research that supports this method
Why 3s and 4s are more memorable
The three levels at which you might talk about your positioning
Why it’s up to you to determine how to add more value
The five things you need to choose your three key messages
The four reasons that clients choose someone else
When to be bold in your positioning
Using one to two words per message
How exactly to word your three messages
The benefits of using rhyming or alliteration
It is up to you to figure out how you're clearly going to add more value than anybody else. Boil it down to three things, because that's more believable and memorable to your clients. Show how in this exact position, you are going to provide a unique value.
Make sure your team is on board so everything is aligned and make sure you learn how to communicate effectively using the tips I shared today so that clients will choose you more often. If you do these things right and embed them in your habits, you can use them forever!
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from Shawn Blanc, Creator of The Focus Course
00:15:49
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Shawn Blanc.
You need to have a plan around business development. A great business developer has a roadmap and knows what they are focused on over time.
Great rainmakers not only have an annual plan, but they also have it broken down into monthly, weekly, and daily tasks.
When everything is mapped out, you can evaluate opportunities accurately against your plan and understand what is worth your time. Without the plan, you are probably just saying yes to everything that comes your way.
Margin can be applied to the four areas of how we think. If you’re feeling stressed about your metrics, you need to expand your pipeline. If you feel stressed about deadlines, you need to pull back and create space to do your best work. If you don’t feel like you have any goodwill left in your relationships, you need to add margin by giving back. For strategy, you need to get down to three main focuses and measure against them.
If you feel like you don’t have the time to make a plan, that’s the signal that you need a plan. Start with looking at what you can delegate or eliminate to free up time so you can come up with a plan and create margin in your strategy.
If you don’t take the time to slow down and breathe, your body will force you to eventually.
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from Mike Michalowicz, Author of Fix This Next
00:15:30
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Mike Michalowicz.
There is the evolution of a business that can be broken down. You don’t want to focus on the higher level elements until addressing the foundations. This is where the Business Hierarchy of Needs comes in.
The foundation of any business that’s service based is sales. You have to get good at business development, if you don’t you will stagnate and fall back. Once you start getting money in the door, you can start thinking about profit and efficiency. Then the next step is making the biggest impact on the people you serve that you can. You can then focus on the legacy of the business so that you can leave the world in a better state than you found it in.
Business development is the foundation, but it’s also intertwined with each level and constantly revisited.
The three questions for clients is a great framework for identifying how you can deepen your relationship with them. “What am I doing right?”, “What’s wrong with our industry?”, and “What other vendors/partners do you depend on?”.
By systematizing those three questions you have an excellent process for identifying where to focus on next.
Focus on one project at a time, even if you have multiple projects you’re working on over a given time period. It can play off your grand overarching strategy in the long term, but you have to pull those big things down to one specific task and focus on that to completion.
This is the last of the 100 micro power-packed episodes series, and I have saved the best for last. There has been one meta lesson that has been underneath all of the other 99 episodes in this series, and that’s what I’m sharing now. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m sharing the number one reason why you should be focusing on getting great at growth. And the reason is that getting great at growth gives you control.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why getting great at growth gives you more control, not less control
The 4 big ways it gives you control
The idea I want you to leave with in this episode is that if you become great at growth, you're going to get control. Not only to live the professional life you want, but those four big wins also impact your personal life as well. It'll give you control to live the life you want in the way that you want.
If you want to go deeper into this topic, make sure to check out The Snowball System. It covers everything we talk about here in greater detail and I know you’ll love it.
What Business Development REALLY Means, According to Henning Streubel
00:14:10
Mo asks Henning Streubel: What is your personal definition of business development?
Henning prefers the term relationship development, which he considers the foundation of every successful service provider.
Henning learned early in his career not to take things personally. If someone doesn’t respond to him, he assumes they must be busy and it’s not about the other person not liking him.
Many experts hesitate to reach out when they don’t get a response right away. It’s important to understand what matters to people and to offer them something they are interested in.
Understand how their mind works on the professional side and send them information that would appeal to that, but don’t be afraid to also reach out on the personal side.
The biggest barrier to relationship success is us.
Henning has a process for understanding where his relationships are in three categories: professional, personal, and friendship. He is always trying to think about how to develop a relationship to take it to the next level.
Simply writing down the top five to ten relationships that are most important for your future self is a powerful tool.
Knowing where you want a relationship to go helps you understand how you can be the most helpful.
One of Henning’s mentors told him early in his career to keep doing the right thing and success will come. Investing in the right relationships will eventually have a commercial benefit.
You don’t need to have all the answers if you can refer a prospect to someone else who can help.
Role model the behavior for your team if you want that behavior to permeate. Make the time to show that you put the mindset into practice and celebrate the effort that people are putting into the work.
Celebrating the little things where you went above and beyond what a normal professional relationship would be. That creates momentum and the right spirit to invest in relationships.
on.bcg.com/henning - Use the envelope icon on this page to get in touch with Henning directly
06 May 2021
How to Hack Our Own Habits to Accomplish More, with Grant Baldwin
00:17:30
Mo asks Grant Baldwin: How can we hack our habits to keep focusing on the long-term and stay top-of-mind?
Speaking is a person-to-person business. One of the keys to success as a speaker is regularly following up with past events or with events that you would like to speak at. There is a consistent turnover each year as event organizers look for new voices and little touch points over the course of a few years will help you stay top-of-mind when they begin the process of looking for their next speaker.
The more times someone is exposed to you and what you do, the more likely they are to feel familiar with you and take you up on your offer.
To organize your follow-up efforts you need to have a system. This could be in the form of a spreadsheet or a CRM, but it can’t just be in your head.
Pre-schedule your follow-up tasks months into the future, that way your only day-to-day task will be to check your CRM and see what you need to do in terms of follow-up for that day.
One of the most important things you can do as a speaker is have a system in place to help you be responsible in your follow-up. When you do follow up after promising to do so, you’re giving the person a taste of what it is like to work with you.
People want to do business with people who make their life easy.
In terms of tasks and time, Grant checks his CRM (currently Hubspot, but the software isn’t as important as the system) each day and then executes on that follow-up task first. These follow-up tasks also give him a high level view of the leads in his pipeline which allows him to plan ahead.
Like a flywheel, you have to keep putting energy and effort into your business or at some point it’s going to stop. You need to put in a little bit of work each day to keep your business going. Build in the time now or it’s going to be 100 times harder to get things going again in six months when you run out of work.
Going Back In Time, What Mark Harris Would Say To His Younger Self
00:12:46
Mo asks Mark Harris: If you could record a message around business development for your younger self, what would it say?
The first thing Mark would say is that business development is a marathon, not a sprint.
The second thing is that the role is a learned skill. People are not born great sales, it’s something you can learn and master.
The third thing is to help others when you can. You’ll be happier helping others with their success than you will ever be with your own success.
When people first get into sales they often sprint towards their first sale, but when they do that they forget about the long-term marathon of relationship building. When you build relationships on that level, the tiny sprints toward each sale become easier over time.
Sales didn’t come naturally to Mark, but when he realized that he was getting better each day that became a big motivation and opened the door to becoming excellent at it.
Helping others when you can helps you be happier, which cycles back to building trust and reinforces the first three lessons.
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from David Burkus, Author of Leading From Anywhere
00:11:55
Mo shares his insights from the habits of David Burkus.
Figuring out how to work and thrive in a virtual world is only going to become more important going forward.
We need to have an agreement with our internal teams and our clients regarding how we are going to work together and communicate with each other. You need to know which platforms are meant for what kinds of communication so that you can be more efficient and effective.
Once you work it out internally, you can share it with your clients and give them an idea of how you can work together while also giving them a model to implement in their own businesses.
White space built into your remote meetings is crucial. The white space around traditional in person meetings doesn’t happen anymore and that was where the informal chat occurred that allowed relationships to develop naturally. Add space to your calendar to have the meeting before the meeting to make this easier.
Be more intentional with your questions. In a virtual world it’s even more important. Being general upfront and asking questions that can be answered either personally or professionally are great for opening up the possibility of getting to know the person.
The Champagne Question is a great first step to helping a client craft a future that’s better for them. People need positivity and optimism in their life and you can add that to their life by asking them the right questions and exploring the answers.
The Business Development Mindset of the Greatest Rainmakers
00:30:11
Mo explores the key business development mindset shifts that you need to make to become great at business development. Find out why business development skills are both learned and earned, how anyone can become great at business development, and how to stay motivated and driven to keep doing the work of building relationships the right way.
Business Development Mindset Is A Learnable Skill
Dr. Kay Anders Ericsson spent over 30 years studying high-end expertise and discovered that every complex skill is both learned and earned.
You can look at any expert and you would find decades of deliberate practice that got them to that level. No one is born with all the skills they need to be great at business development.
Business development is a learnable skill that anyone can build on.
If you take each individual lesson and apply them to your life, you will be successful.
If someone tries to tell you that business development skills are not learnable or only for natural born conversationalists, they’re wrong. They just haven’t seen the research.
If you want to be great at business development, break things down into bite- sized pieces. Break complex tasks down into individual pieces and practice each one as it comes.
Business Development Mindset Rule - You Don't Have To Be An Extrovert To Succeed
Adam Grant did a study on salespeople and put them on a spectrum of introversion to extroversion.
For most people they land right in the middle and end up being a mix of both introvert and extrovert, and most successful salespeople were exactly the same way. Ambiverts were the most successful at making sales, not extroverts like people assumed was the case.
Full-on extroverts might actually have some disadvantages when it comes to making a sale. Their desire to be around people all the time may prevent them from following up effectively or being direct with someone when they need to challenge them.
Extreme introverts likely just aren’t putting themselves around other people most of the time, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get energy from interacting with them or can’t be effective salespeople.
The magic in sales and business development happens at the middle of the curve, where you can connect with people in the moment and follow up thoughtfully later. Luckily for most people, that’s where they fall.
You don’t have to be extroverted to be successful at sales.
Great business developers have a wonderful mix of being around people, getting energy from the interactions, asking great questions, and giving great ideas. They can also go back to their quiet surroundings and find ways to follow up thoughtfully.
Becoming Great At Anything By Creating a Business Development Mindset
Every expertise, no matter the field, is both learned and earned.
You can become great at anything if you break it down into little pieces and practice each piece.
You may not become world-class or be able to play in the NBA, but you can certainly become very good at that particular skill, and the key is deliberate practice.
By breaking down the big skill into smaller micro-skills and deliberately practicing those individually, you build your overall skill set.
The second component of deliberate practice is having a mentor guide you along the path towards expertise.
When it comes to business development, what kinds of attractive content can you create to get your name out there? What valuable thing do you have to offer the world that you can get out there and expose others to your way of thinking?
Once you’ve got a system for generating content and attracting leads, it becomes a matter of turning those connections into one-to-one conversations.
This is where the Give to Get comes in. Start solving client problems in a small, bite-sized way, and it can open the door to bigger opportunities.
If you think you can’t do what someone else is doing, toss that out of your mind. Narrow what they do down to a specific skill that you can improve on and get to work.
Don't worry about how you stack up with others. It doesn't matter. Focus on your own skills, always getting a little bit better all the time.
Having a Business Development Mindset Means Knowing What Motivates a Buyer
When you’re being sold to, you almost want to run away. You can tell the salesperson has only their best interests in mind, not yours.
We are happy to buy when the reverse is true. When we’re learning and we feel like the other person is helping us discover the option that’s right for us, the experience is wonderful.
When we buy something, we’re important. We are being catered to and we’re learning in the process. It’s like having a birthday experience where you feel like the people you’re interacting with really care.
If you don’t like selling, you need to reframe your perspective. Instead of selling, think that you’re someone that creates wonderful buying experiences that make people feel good.
Flush the idea of selling and focus on the idea of creating a wonderful buying experience. That one mindset shift will change everything.
You are 100% in control of the buying experience. You’re helping people succeed, remember that. The more you do that, the more you will win and the more that people will talk about how great you are to their colleagues.
Start Crafting Your Business Development Mindset By Understanding Your Why
Business development can be hard. You’ve got to figure out a reason to persevere and keep adding value to your relationships, even when it feels like you’re not making much progress.
To discover your why, ask yourself the Five Whys? Go deeper into the core reasons you do what you do until you discover the truth.
Start with the question: “Why is getting great at Business Development important to me?” When you’ve got your answer, add a why to the beginning and ask why that thing is important.
Your fifth answer is where the rubber meets the road, and you discover what’s really driving you. Once you have it, write it down and put it somewhere that will remind you daily why you put in the work.
Avoid staying too superficial with your motivation and realize that your why might change over time, so it’s a good practice to repeat the exercise every few years or when you feel like you’re not as motivated as you used to be.
What Business Development REALLY Means, According to Brian Caffarelli
00:17:08
Mo asks Brian Caffarelli: What is your personal definition of business development?
Brian likes to think of business development as the art and science of guiding the buyer through their journey to an informed and confident decision.
Just because you know the science, that doesn’t mean you’ll be great at business development. It’s equal parts the art of empathy and flexibility, and science of habits and communication.
Mountain climbing guides are great metaphors for business development. Really good salespeople are helping people reach their own personal summit and get what they need to experience from the mountain.
The defining characteristic of a guide is the ability to inspire trust. Trust comes before the sale. You need to be able to see ahead of corners for your buyers, and to challenge their thinking where appropriate.
The challenge for the guide is in focusing on what the buyer needs over their own needs.
Work on the skills and behaviors that inspire trust in you and live your life with integrity so you are worthy of that trust. Study why people buy, because that is going to be your biggest point of leverage for creating a great buying experience.
Angela Meyer on Building The Relationship To Win The Business
00:56:14
Angela Meyer shares her thoughts and wisdom on business development based on years in the field as a consultant and executive for various companies. Learn why being deliberate about honing your communication skills is one of the most important things you can do to improve your business relationships, why being willing to fail is the key to long-term success, and why the Give to Get is your most valuable business development tool in your toolbelt.
Mo asks Angela Meyer: When was the time that you realized that business development was worth focusing on?
Angela’s background is in mechanical engineering and it was during her graduate education while working with her professor where she learned the communication skills to be a great consultant. After beginning her career, Angela got a lot of hands-on experience in the business side of things while working with the CEO of a forensic engineering company. That’s where she learned that in order to be a great consultant, she couldn’t just be running calculations, she had to become good at developing relationships.
Angela always thought that she was a good speaker and communicator, but after giving a presentation on a case study that she had worked on and not being able to answer the questions from the audience, she knew she had some room to improve.
After seeing a recording of herself during a presentation, Angela knew that if she was going to be good at business development, she was going to have to improve her communication skills.
Soft skills turn into hard results.
Angela improves incrementally by watching people do great work and trying to learn from them. The other aspect is putting it into practice. You have to try and fail.
If you don’t try, you don’t learn. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
From Angela’s perspective, she has multiple failures, but she uses those failures to learn and get better.
You can’t rely on your company to train you to become a better, more well-rounded consultant. The presentation training class that Angela attended was the best $150 she spent.
If you’re not willing to put yourself out there and try to build a relationship, you might as well stay in the back office.
Start with your network that you know or see everyday. Create a list of all the people you’ve worked with over the past six months and see when the last time you connected with them without talking about the project. It’s about getting the next small win and developing the relationship and building your network.
Mo asks Angela Meyer: What is your personal definition of business development?
Angela doesn’t use the term business development. In her previous position she was the Vice President of Client Services. She wanted to avoid the term business development because she’s in the relationship business and not selling to people.
Unless you’re selling a commodity, no matter how smart you are, without building a relationship and providing value for a client and gaining their trust, you’ll never get the business.
Angela got her first job at the age of 13 working at an amusement park. She believes that everyone should work in service when they are younger because it teaches you essential relationship skills. You need a complete skill set and not just technical chops.
If you want to improve you have to continue to expand past your current role.
Angela loves the business development process because it’s an opportunity to grow herself, the brand reputation of the firm she’s working with, and her knowledge of how she can help clients.
It’s okay to not like it or to be afraid because it comes with the territory. If you grow your relationships one client at a time, those people will help you grow your career. Your raving fans will open doors for you to walk through.
The way that Angela likes to learn about new areas she needs to be able to sell is setting up a Google alert for it. When Angela has a client that would be interested in a topic she’s reading about, she’ll forward the article to them.
As she’s gotten older, Angela makes use of a CRM to remind her of information and things she needs to do. Combining those two methods together works very well.
When you’re a highly skilled technician, it can be challenging to see things outside your focus. Don’t feel like you have to do everything alone. You can pair up with other people in your organization and share skills and ideas.
Mo asks Angela Meyer: What is your favorite science, step, or story that you learned from GrowBIG Training or The Snowball System?
Angela’s favorite strategy is the Give to Get. Giving somebody value or knowledge they didn’t have before is a great way to start off a relationship.
If you continue to show interest in someone personally, and not just professionally, and provide them value that can help them grow their career, they are going to care about you.
You have to break someone out of the rut of working with someone else if it’s not you. Building trust and deepening the relationship in the beginning is crucial to starting things out.
Angela has seen a number of her former colleagues help clients and prospects by summarizing the science on particular issues like climate change, sustainability, and environmental compliance.
There is a big difference between forwarding an article to a client and talking the person through the content.
The hardest thing is asking for the business, which is why you should simply ask for the next step. No is just another answer.
You have to be able to explain more and give more so that eventually the answer is going to be yes. You can’t assume your client is going to read and consume the content you send them. You have to ask them for the opportunity to explain how it’s helpful and why you sent it to them.
Mo asks Angela Meyer: What is a business development moment that you’re particularly proud of?
You have to build the relationship and understand that the work may not come in the first meeting.
Angela tells the story of a client that was in-house counsel for a major company that Angela’s firm had done a lot of work for. He set a dinner meeting with this attorney and during the conversation discovered that he felt completely unappreciated by Angela’s firm.
You have to be willing to ask questions and get feedback from your clients on how they like working with your firm.
Angela turned that relationship around by helping the attorney with a few of his presentations he was giving. By providing value and showing that she cared, he became a valuable client for years.
It takes a lot of good experiences to outweigh the effect of one bad experience. Sometimes the negative experience can be something as simple as not picking up the check.
In the initial consultation, it’s important to establish the lines and modes of communication. It’s also important to set the expectation around the first bill. Most professional service firms fail around client management.
At the end of the engagement always ask for feedback. That time is the perfect opportunity to land more work or a referral to someone else.
Mo asks Angela Meyer: If you could send a message to your prior self, what would you say?
No matter what business you’re in, it’s important to not be afraid to try and not be afraid to fail. You need to fail before you can succeed.
You’re always selling yourself or your product, so you have to be willing to extend yourself and grow.
Hone your communication skills and learn how to bring the energy to a conversation that creates connection with someone.
The third thing would be to build your network. Stay in touch with people and keep networking because you never know where your next job is going to come from.
Be excited about what you’re doing and what you’re working on. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure. For Angela, the energy she brings to her relationships is what makes her memorable.
Everybody has some level of impostor syndrome. You don’t need to be cocky to believe in yourself. Humility to admit you don’t know everything is a good place to approach things. The big lesson is to be confident in your ability to try your best, to keep learning, and to get better over time.
How to Build Deeper Relationships Using the Five Keys to Likeability
00:07:30
This week on Real Relationships Real Revenue, we are focusing on relationships. I’m going to give you a ton of steps and mindset tips about how to deepen your relationships. A great deal can make your year, but a great relationship can make your career. In this episode, I’m sharing the science of building relationships and the science of likeability.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Commonality
Frequency
Mutual benefit
Balance
Uniqueness
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that likeability is innate. It’s not! It’s a learnable skill and you can get better at it. You can take these tips and dial up your likeability for your most important relationships.
Make sure to check out this free mini-course called BD Habits. This will help you dig way deeper into how to create a system to manage your opportunities, manage your relationships, and manage yourself.
The Business Development Story That Changed Everything for Tyler Sweatt
00:13:32
Mo asks Tyler Sweatt: Tell me a business development story that you are really proud of.
At Second Front, Tyler is working to solve some ridiculously complicated problems and building something that has never existed before.
Tyler has been in several different industries, all of which involve emerging technology and security. In most of those industries, compliance burdens were always an issue and Second Front is working on solving that. They have figured out a solution that solves a pressing national security problem and has opened new doors of opportunity that could be saving lives.
The Second Front team is the best team he’s been a part of since leaving the military, and he loves the fact that he’s proving people wrong. When somebody tells him that something can’t be done, that motivates Tyler to go and prove them wrong.
It’s a lot easier to maintain things than it is to create things. At its core, business development is always new and always different, which is something that Tyler appreciates.
Know what your why is, and it’s okay if that changes over time. For Tyler, being able to set examples for his sons and have teachable moments is the core of why he does what he does in his season of life.
Going Back In Time, What Angela Meyer Would Say To Her Younger Self
00:10:25
Mo asks Angela Meyer: If you could send a message to your prior self, what would you say?
No matter what business you’re in, it’s important to not be afraid to try and not be afraid to fail. You need to fail before you can succeed.
You’re always selling yourself or your product, so you have to be willing to extend yourself and grow.
Hone your communication skills and learn how to bring the energy to a conversation that creates connection with someone.
The third thing would be to build your network. Stay in touch with people and keep networking because you never know where your next job is going to come from.
Be excited about what you’re doing and what you’re working on. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure. For Angela, the energy she brings to her relationships is what makes her memorable.
Everybody has some level of impostor syndrome. You don’t need to be cocky to believe in yourself. Humility to admit you don’t know everything is a good place to approach things. The big lesson is to be confident in your ability to try your best, to keep learning, and to get better over time.
Maria Kelly on Your Worth – Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:15:35
Mo asks Maria Kelly: When did you realize that you really had to focus on business development and client relationships?
Maria’s career didn’t begin in client-facing roles but they were usually oriented around being helping and finding solutions for people. When she moved into more managerial roles, she was overseeing people who faced the client. It wasn’t until Maria went through the GrowBIG training where she realized that business development had been a part of her life the whole time, and her clients were her colleagues and the people she worked with.
Everyone who went through the GrowBIG training had the lightbulb moment where they realized that they could be doing business development differently. The ones that embraced the Snowball System started seeing results almost immediately and people took notice.
Maria started doing bi-weekly meetings specifically focused on business development and the various strategies of the Snowball System. The Give to Get was a particular favorite of the team.
One of the keys to Maria’s success with her team was in shifting them from retrospectives to thinking and planning for the future. Being proactive and changing the approach to being helpful allowed them to focus on the long-term view of their business.
For small businesses, they often struggle with many of the same issues that many professional service firms do. Entrepreneurs have to be able to step back from the execution and take some time to focus on the future and growth of the business they are working in.
Secrets to Thriving Under Pressure with Author and Retired Navy SEAL Officer, Rich Diviney
00:35:06
What does it take to truly excel under pressure, build an unbeatable team, and achieve your goals?
In this episode, I sit down with Rich Diviney, retired Navy SEAL officer and author, to uncover the secrets behind human performance and team dynamics. Rich shares his insights on the attributes that determine success, how to identify them in ourselves and others, and what separates good performers from exceptional ones. We dive into the profound difference between skills and attributes, the power of humility, and how to leverage resilience and perseverance in both life and business.
Whether you're striving to grow your business, lead a high-performing team, or simply become the best version of yourself, this episode will keep you moving forward. Tune in and find out what it really takes to thrive in uncertain and challenging environments.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The difference between skills and attributes—and why one matters more under pressure
The essential attribute for bouncing back after setbacks
Why humility is the secret weapon of high-performing teams
How to focus only on what you can control and avoid the trap of overthinking
The surprising link between your identity and your performance
Why perseverance without resilience can lead to burnout
The Navy SEAL approach to breaking down overwhelming challenges
A quick tool to master compartmentalization and stay focused under stress
Special code for 15% off the assessment: REALRELATIONSHIPS15
01 Nov 2022
The Rock-Solid First Step To Client Planning
00:10:06
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m giving you a rock-solid first step to start your client planning. These are the most important things to getting your team grounded. We’re going to be covering your current state and future state. This first step will get your team unstuck and looking toward the future instead of the past.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why you need to be looking toward the future
Questions to ask yourself about your clients
Future vision
This will help you avoid the trap of being way too focused on the past. We’ll blitz through all of the science that we talked about in the last episode and get you clear on where you’re at today and where you want to be in the future. The future vision conversation is the most important part.
If you are interested in crafting a vision for anything, make sure to check out my conversation with Michael Hyatt. We talked about some really interesting ways to craft a vision for yourself or your organization.
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from Dorie Clark, Author of The Long Game
00:15:22
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Dorie Clark.
Build time into your schedule specifically to interact with people that you find interesting. When Mo was originally designing the Grow Big principles and training he created the concept of narrowing your relationships to people that you can proactively commit to reaching out to once a month. One of the categories is interesting people because interesting people spend time with interesting people.
Relationships with interesting people can lead to incredible places, even if there is absolutely no expectation of any commercial benefit to begin with.
When someone asks you to do something that is not quite the best use of your time there are four simple steps to say no nicely. Dorie has another simple three step system of triage you can use to filter out the most egregious.
First, ask for more info. Second, ask for more granular info. Third, suggest a different approach once you know what’s being asked of you.
The power of pre-commitment to hack your habits is a great tool to ensure you do what you know you should do. Put those activities on your calendar and make them the default, instead of trying to fit them into the chaos of your day where they will be endless pushed off by the whirlwind.
How to Hack Our Own Habits to Accomplish More, with Ozan Varol
00:14:58
Mo asks Ozan Varol: How can we hack our own habits to be successful over a long period of time?
The best way to grow your business is to do nothing. So many of us are in constant hustle mode, constantly going from one thing to the next. There is an incredible value in simply doing nothing but thinking.
Schedule time every day that is dedicated to unplugging and thinking. Don’t approach it with an agenda or an outcome, just write down whatever comes to your mind. 95% of your thoughts will be junk, but the remaining 5% can be invaluable.
Research shows that when you are daydreaming, a region of the brain called the default node network comes alive and that region is associated with creativity. When you let your mind wander you are allowing your subconscious to connect the dots that you would otherwise have missed.
This is why so many great ideas come to people in the shower. If you can take that and build it into your day, you’ll find that it will become the most valuable time on your schedule.
Do what works for you. Thinking time can take the form of going for a walk, exercising, or just sitting in your favorite armchair. As long as you are stepping away from distractions you are opening yourself to great ideas.
We are walking repositories of epiphanies, the problem is we are generally too distracted to receive them. Creativity comes as a subtle whisper, and if you’re not paying attention, it’s very easy to miss.
Avoid using your phone or laptop to take notes. For Ozan, that means a notepad and pencil.
Put it on your calendar and treat it like a meeting. Start it as an experiment and start small.
Part of the reason that people shy away from this kind of practice is there doesn’t appear to be an immediate return on the time. Approach it as a long term investment that will turn into amazing opportunities in the future. You need to find a balance between the short term demands of business and your long term vision.
How to Add Value to Your Relationships by Utilizing Asset Lists
00:08:33
In the last few episodes, we have been dialing in on building and utilizing relationships in your business. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m sharing how you can add value in non-paid ways so that you can really strengthen your relationships.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Adding value in the commercial sense
Adding value in non-paid ways
Tips for creating an asset list
The trick to adding value is to really engage in conversations with people you have a relationship with and understand their goals and what’s important to them.
Become a collector of things that you find interesting. Create an asset list by finding articles that you find interesting and saving the URL’s somewhere on your phone. You can use this to add value to people’s lives over time.
If you’re interested in learning more about this, check out my conversation with James Barclay. He shares how he uses first among equals relationships and asset lists along with so much more.
Scott Winter, Dennis Baltz, and Andrew Cogar Discuss Why It's Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:45:15
Mo asks Scott Winter: When was the moment that you realized that business development was great?
Scott started his career off in sales with LexisNexis and that developed into a role in consulting. Eventually he made the switch to a product management position with Interaction where he focused on CRM and client relationships.
Interaction is the world’s largest CRM system for law firms and by coming up in that environment, Scott learned a lot about the technical aspects of the software which helped him better serve his clients.
Scott had the typical mindset about sales in college that most people have, but he reframed his perspective after getting some actual experience in sales positions.
The one key moment when Scott realized that business development was a powerful tool for growth was after having a simple conversation with someone on a plan. Just listening carefully and remembering what he learned blew that person away when they met again many months later.
Scott has a knack for having a conversation on any subject and being able to find a point of connection. He also tends to add notes in his phone of a particularly interesting detail (powerlifting, ironman training, etc.) and makes use of his CRM to keep track of everything.
Remembering details about someone is an art and a science, but there are tools you can use to make it easier.
Mo asks Dennis Baltz: When did you realize that business development is something that would be interesting to you?
Dennis’s interest in business development goes all the way back to his high school days in 1987, where he was trying to find people to participate in market studies. It was a tough gig and he had to stretch outside his comfort zone to get things done.
Knowing that he had something of value to offer to the people gave him the confidence to ask for something they may not be initially open to. Dennis learned to be interested in the person first and think about the value he could provide, instead of assuming the ‘no’ right away.
Dennis has been on all sides of the transaction when it comes to risk during his career, so that gives him some perspective on what potential buyers are looking for. Initial meetings are simply about identifying problems and how you can be helpful.
Preparing for the meetings ahead of time is crucial to Dennis’s success. Following up usually involves finding resources or people to connect the prospect with that can help solve the problem in the meantime.
Introducing techniques from another industry is a great way to appeal to a potential client’s desire for both safety and innovation.
On the human side of things, Dennis realized that he needed to stay in front of clients at the beginning of the pandemic and that turned into a monthly blog post that he sends to clients and colleagues. Being open and vulnerable, and sharing some of the personal elements of his life, have had a tremendous impact.
Mo asks Andrew Cogar: When did you realize that business development was really important?
It really clicked when Andrew started thinking about business development not as a means of getting business but as a means for the firm to get the business they need to forge their own path.
After one particular project that went exceedingly well, Andrew understood that those kinds of projects could become a habit rather than a lucky break.
The GrowBIG System is essentially about doing the right things so that you have control over the kinds of clients you work with. Being proactive gives you so much work that you can pick and choose the projects that you want most.
It’s easier to be reactive on the front end because you don’t have to do the introspective work it takes to shape your vision and be proactive on finding the right business. It’s easier in the long term to adopt the right principles to attract the right clientele.
Mo and Andrew do a review of their recent experience working together. In terms of business development, Andrew was simply looking to get to know Mo and the family and understand what he was looking for.
As an architect, Andrew is hoping to gauge how open someone is to suggestions and that’s an intentional part of the conversation.
At the end of the day, who Andrew works for and who he works with, has become more important to him and the firm than what he works on.
Do a little research before a client meeting and come with a set of questions and follow-up questions for them. Don’t be afraid to give some ideas away during the meeting. When you give away a little, you get value back in the things you learn. If you go in with a sales pitch, you don’t learn anything. Show up with questions, not qualifications.
Mitch Joel on Six Pixels of Separation – What You Need To Succeed
00:12:42
Mo asks Mitch Joel: What is your big idea for getting better at retention and growth?
Whether it’s digital or not, it’s all about relationships and relationships are built on the stories you tell and how you deliver on them.
Most people tend to market themselves with promises instead of with their overall story. The ethos of the Madmen era of advertising still permeates the way many professionals think.
You don’t have to be personal, you just have to be personable. That’s the story that is going to connect with the right kinds of customers, which is something that you need to be focused on.
As professionals, we all have to figure out what kind of content we are going to create. It can come in whatever form you like, whether that’s audio, video, or written. The content you create should have a bullseye that you’re aiming for within the Triangle of Attention.
Even if your approach or niche isn’t unique, you can still bring your unique voice to the table to make your brand stand out.
Human beings prefer regularity. Content you create should follow an editorial calendar instead of being posted whenever you happen to feel like it. Content should be scheduled regularly and you need to stick with the schedule.
Seth Godin refers to this as the “Drip Strategy.” Content is a drip and if you create enough drips they become a ripple, the ripple creates waves, and the waves fill the ocean.
The vast majority of the content you create will garner virtual crickets but cumulatively over time it creates a sense of presence, social proof, and credibility.
How to Go into Business Meetings Fully Prepared No Matter What Comes Up
00:06:28
In the last few episodes, we have been covering dynamic meeting prep and helping people get out of the habit of not preparing for meetings by showing them how to prepare very efficiently for the big day. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m sharing how you can be ready for anything.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why you should be ready for anything
Negative visualization and planning for things that go wrong
Business development meetings rarely go the way you expect them to. They may want to talk about something different than you do, the meeting could go long, they could want to introduce you to people, etc. There are so many things that could come up and you want to be prepared. Really think it through so that you can have more successful meetings.
If you want to learn more about negative visualization and how it can help you succeed, make sure to check out what Ryan Holiday has to say about it all. It is really interesting and I think you’ll enjoy it.
Maria Kelly's, Monty Hamilton's, and Warren Shiver's Favorite Business Development Strategy
00:51:12
Mo asks Maria Kelly: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG training or Snowball System?
One of the most useful things Maria learned from the GrowBIG training was the seven pricing principles. Living in Switzerland, she grew up in a culture that didn’t talk about money and she learned early on in her career that if she didn’t talk about money, she didn’t get the money.
Many business owners and professionals struggle with asking for what they are worth. When clients push back on the fees, those people don’t know how to respond because they don’t know how to articulate their value and justify their price.
There are seven common heuristic programs that people use when thinking about money. One of the most common is that your price is directly linked to the quality of your service. In other words, expensive equals good, and cheap equals bad.
If you’re upfront with the value you are bringing to the table and anchoring to that, no one is going to second guess what you charge.
With the idea of anchoring on value, you can talk about the result and the magnitude of the value of it and use that as a frame for whatever your fees are. Introduce early on what value you are bringing to the relationship, and your fees will seem small in comparison.
Most people expect to pay for a service, but when it comes to ourselves we often make assumptions about what other people will think about our own services to others. If someone is hiring you, they want the best. You have to lean into and be confident with your fees.
At the point you talk about the fees, if you have built up enough value and trust with the person, you will be more confident in your delivery. It’s not about sticking with the number no matter what, it’s about working together to find a solution and a price that fits all parties. Even if you can’t find an alternative, do your best to part on good terms.
If you can talk about the money with the same excitement and tone that you discuss the team, the scope of the project, and the details, you will feel consistent and confident and get better results.
Mo asks Monty Hamilton: What’s your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG Training or Snowball System?
The blueprint of Monty’s business is think big, start small, scale up.
Rural Sourcing started out as a 10 person organization and has since scaled up to 1,000 employees, with the future goal of 3,000 employees and 30 centers all over America.
It’s a growth mindset that can be applied across a 10,000 person organization, but it can also be applied to your personal life. Great intentions can be sabotaged if you try to do too much, too fast.
Recognize that, as an individual, you will never be able to do it all. You have personal limitations and must be able to recognize those limitations to unlock your business’ potential.
You’re not going to be perfect on day 1 or day 10,001. The goal is continuous improvement. With that mindset, you can do better, you can get bigger, you can do more.
Being willing to reinvest is critical to knowing where you can add value and where someone else can add the value that’s missing.
To scale up to the next level, you need to understand your strengths and your weaknesses, and to know that you need to ask your peers, colleagues, bosses, and people you can trust to give their honest opinion.
People are usually happy to give you feedback, and when you find someone willing to give it to you because they want you to be successful, you may have found a great mentor.
Mo asks Warren Shiver: What’s your favorite science, step, or story from the Snowball System or GrowBIG training?
Warren has been working with Mo during the early days of the GrowBIG training and has been a big fan of the Protemoi list and the step-by-step opportunity process.
The first part of the opportunity process is listening and learning. Being able to repeat it back to the prospect and proving that they’ve been heard is how you earn the right to go to the next step.
Weekly, monthly, or quarterly sales targets influence behaviors that always align with the listen-and-learn process. The opportunity process doesn’t require more time, but it does require an emphasis on patience, understanding, and a collaborative approach. Many companies are still struggling with the more rigid, linear mindset of selling.
Clients don’t want to hear your language or why your company is awesome. You should approach the sales cycle with a fresh-eyes mindset and assume the position of someone just getting started solution-wise.
Earned Dogmatism is a proven mental heuristic that states the more we believe we have an expertise in some area, the more close-minded we become.
The Protemoi list is a mental framework that can pay off at any time. Think about the relationships that might be important to you tomorrow, and the frequency of staying in touch that keeps those relationships alive.
The first step of the Protemoi list is to write it down. Warren uses a spreadsheet to keep track of his list, and one of his weekly MIT’s is to always check in with the people on his list.
It’s okay for people to drop off. Depending on the situation, Warren reaches out weekly or monthly to stay in touch in any way he can that adds value.
Warren looks for interesting articles that he can send people or whatever way he can connect with someone on the list that makes sense.
The Protemoi list also scales to a team or organizational level. You should be having all your people working to build trust and the relationship along the way.
Dorie Clark Demonstrates How to Play The Long Game
00:59:46
Dorie Clark shares the long term strategies that generate lasting business development success. Learn how to create relationships with interesting people and how that can lead to incredible outcomes, a simple system for saying no so you can say yes to the right things more often, and how pre-commitment can force you to create better business development habits, and more.
Mo asks Dorie: What’s your big idea when it comes to business development?
One of the key things that professional service providers need to grapple with are the long term and short term needs of business and life. Long term relationship building is what really drives results, but in the short term we still need to generate business.
When it comes to networking and building your network of relationships, there are three ways to go about doing it and the first is the most commonly thought of and also the reason the majority of people dislike networking.
Short term networking is all about making the sale and what you can immediately extract from someone. When you already have a relationship with someone you can be direct and ask for the sale, but it’s not conducive to creating a real relationship.
With long term networking you’re not trying to immediately get something out of the other person, and in Infinite Horizon networking you cultivate relationships solely because they are interesting and you never know where people will end up over time. It’s about having an infinite perspective of what’s possible.
It’s about being helpful and meeting interesting people. When we think about networking most people think of it as a chore, but reorienting it towards meeting new and interesting people can change how we feel about it. Just getting to know someone is more than enough to build a great relationship.
We are all pressed for time but we can all find an hour in our week to make this kind of networking possible, it’s just a matter of prioritizing it. In the era of the pandemic it’s also possible to host virtual cocktail parties to get to know people.
Optimize for interesting, instead of money. Follow your curiosity, meet with interesting people, and you will go in interesting directions.
Mo asks Dorie: How can we use The Long Game to grow our book of business and create more opportunities?
One of the things that frustrates a lot of people with big goals is that the goal seems so unattainable in the moment.
20% Time is a concept that a number of companies use to make it easier to achieve those larger, more long term goals. Business development professionals can use a similar concept within their own careers and pursue ideas that are interesting and have potential.
You can accomplish almost anything, the key variable is the runway. Planning methodically to achieve your goal can make incredible things happen.
You don’t have to make a leap of faith, if you have an audacious goal and give yourself enough runway while devoting small amounts of time to it consistently, there is very little risk involved.
20% Time is a way to achieve big goals in a way that derisks the proposition. Your 20% Time can take a number of forms from networking, to creating a podcast, to crafting a compelling keynote speech, and more.
If you want to build a business development process that works it’s going to take time and you have to dedicate the time to make it happen.
Mo asks Dorie: How can we use the concepts of The Long Game to establish and build the relationship advantage?
Turning down offers and clearing your plate is how you free up your time and space to connect with the right people. The more successful we become as professionals the more in demand we are, and the people who want to spend time with us may not be the people that we should be spending time with.
Being able to say no more often and being comfortable while doing it is the key to being able to dedicate your time to the right things. One of the easiest ways to deflect well meaning people that you don’t want to commit to is simply asking for more information. Just by making them jump through some simple hoops and provide some more info you can screen out the tire kickers.
The next step is to ask for a certain level of granularity in the request. Asking for an agenda is advance can be very valuable so you can focus directly on the important topics and cut out the fluff.
Ask if it’s possible to discuss things asynchronously where they send you their questions and you reply with a voicemail when you have time. It’s also an option to simply invite someone to something you are already doing, which makes creating these kinds of connections scalable.
Mo asks Dorie: How can we hold ourselves accountable, hack our own habits, and keep doing what we know we should be doing?
The first chapter of the Long Game deals with the question of why we seem to be so busy in our modern lives. One of the most critical aspects of senior leaders is setting the strategy for their organization and yet when asked, 96% of senior leaders say they don’t have enough time for strategy.
We need to be honest with ourselves and realize that many of the constraints of “busyness” are in many ways things that we put on ourselves. For many of us there is a culture of busyness and research has shown a link to busyness and self-worth.
We can set up structures in our lives to create pre-commitment and push us towards better behavior. Accountability groups are great examples. Creating accountability structures for yourself enables you to make habits of good behavior instead of negative patterns.
High achieving professionals generally hate breaking commitments. Having activities in your calendar that you know you should do will make it much more likely that you will actually follow through.
If you do the hardest but most beneficial activities early in the day, the rest of your work will sort itself out into your schedule. This avoids the chaos of the day from pushing those activities off indefinitely.
Mo shares his insights from Dorie's habits.
Build time into your schedule specifically to interact with people that you find interesting. When Mo was originally designing the Grow Big principles and training he created the concept of narrowing your relationships to people that you can proactively commit to reaching out to once a month. One of the categories is interesting people because interesting people spend time with interesting people.
Relationships with interesting people can lead to incredible places, even if there is absolutely no expectation of any commercial benefit to begin with.
When someone asks you to do something that is not quite the best use of your time there are four simple steps to say no nicely. Dorie has another simple three step system of triage you can use to filter out the most egregious.
First, ask for more info. Second, ask for more granular info. Third, suggest a different approach once you know what’s being asked of you.
The power of pre-commitment to hack your habits is a great tool to ensure you do what you know you should do. Put those activities on your calendar and make them the default, instead of trying to fit them into the chaos of your day where they will be endless pushed off by the whirlwind.
Big Ideas to Succeed with Karim Nehdi, Josh Kaufman and L. David Marquet
00:24:21
Big Ideas that you need for success was a theme throughout season 2 and we are highlighting some thoughts from Karim Nehdi, Josh Kaufman and L. David Marquet in this recap episode.
How to Meet the People You Want In Ways They'll Love with Jay Thompson
01:00:11
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I sat down with Jay Thompson, one of my favorite facilitators and coaches that we get to work with. He has led countless sessions and coaching groups applying GrowBIG and all of our trainings, so he really knows his stuff.
In this episode, we are diving into Jay’s favorite parts of the GrowBIG training and the 16 proven methods to start new relationships with people. Jay has tons of tips that I know you’ll find really valuable so I’m excited to share this conversation with you.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What GrowBIG is all about
The three things that make an incredible difference with our trainings
Why everybody can learn business development
The importance of understanding your own growth pace
The power of becoming an expert in understanding your client
Making the buying experience easy and enjoyable for the clients
How to actually get to know your prospects or clients
The power of value and trust
The 16 methods of beginning new relationships with people
Jay’s top tips to keep learning
I hope you found this episode valuable! There are so many different methods to begin new relationships with people. Focusing on value and trust is key to your success.
The Three Scientific Headwinds Against You When It Comes to Retention and Growth
00:07:11
This week on Real Relationships Real Revenue, we are talking about effective and strategic client planning. Many people make mistakes when it comes to this so we will be covering how you can do this really well, where you can get the most ROI on your time invested, and how to do it in a way that your clients will love. These are the three scientific headwinds that are against you when it comes to retention and growth.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The biggest mistakes we see with client planning
Anchoring and the status quo bias
Earned dogmatism
Self-enhancement bias
We’re probably biased toward staying where we are at or even shrinking, but we need to be thinking about how we can be bringing new experts, new activities, and new solutions to our clients in a way that is helpful and proactive.
To learn more about the status quo bias, make sure to check out the Wikipedia page on it. It is very interesting and it might be a great thing to share with your team.
David Burkus on Creating Real Relationships in a Virtual World
00:55:36
David Burkus shares extremely timely strategies for deepening your relationships in a virtual world, whether that’s within your team that’s spread across the globe or with prospective clients that are just getting to know you. Learn how to create a system for communication that makes your remote team more effective, how to recreate the white space online where bonds and trust are built, and how to ask better questions to really get to know someone.
Mo asks David Burkus: How do you develop relationships with your clients virtually?
The future of work is working from anywhere. The truth is that we are not going back to the office. Even before the pandemic, studies were showing that people are more engaged when they are out of the office 40% to 60% of the time.
We need greater flexibility, trust, and autonomy with the people that we collaborate with in a remote environment.
Communication is actually more important now that it was before. We can’t take as many non-verbal cues as we could when we were working together, so we need to be more deliberate and empathetic in our communication.
One of the first things we need to be doing with prospective clients is talking about how we are going to be working together. This is now part of the process of closing the deal.
One major tip is that eye contact is not eye contact when you’re communicating online. You have to look into the camera lens to recreate the experience and connection of eye contact. The other thing to realize is that communication is more asynchronous than ever before. Make sure you have clear writing and thinking in your written communication. You also have to be clear about what each method of communication is meant for.
To enroll clients, the easiest way is to have an established communications system within your team already. Create a team-working agreement and then use that to create the framework of client communication. Schedule a meeting to create your team-working agreement, and get answers to all of the questions written down into a shared document. Then get every team member to agree.
Mo asks David Burkus: How can we create demand and get deals done virtually?
The traditional method of closing a deal usually involved meeting clients in person but it wasn’t the activity itself that determined the failure or success of the deal. It was the whitespace around the meeting that built the bonds that led to trust.
Most people don’t build that into their virtual meetings, which is something that we really need to do.
You build trust and bonds in the unstructured, open space around the meeting time and you need to build that into remote environments.
What are the white space moments that built relationships in person and how can you recreate those experiences in your remote working environment?
To allow people to get to know each other, give them space to ask questions and get answers. Structure some questions to allow people to learn about each other and in a way where everyone has the opportunity to share a problem they are facing.
One of the best questions you can ask is “If you and I are meeting again a year from now over a bottle of Champagne, what are we celebrating?”
Mo asks David Burkus: How do we develop and deepen relationships when everything is virtual?
A study showed that the average person’s network shrunk by 25% to 30% over the first half of 2020. That decrease was almost entirely driven by males because of the general tendency for men to bond over activities. We tried to recreate these activities virtually but it doesn’t work the same way.
When you’re looking to use a tool like Zoom to deepen a relationship, it requires more structure. You have to show up with questions and a level of conversation designed to deepen the relationship.
Work sprints are another option, which are scheduled times where you complete your work in a meeting environment to emulate the coworking space.
In addition to these activities, you can also introduce rituals into your team communication to deepen the connection.
Between structured conversations that explore non-work topics and physical things like rituals, we can go pretty far in deepening relationships in a remote working environment.
The questions don’t matter as much as having a plan and being intentional. Asking questions that are open-ended and answered in a work or non-work context is a good start. One of David’s favorite questions is “Who is your favorite superhero?” No matter what the answer is, you will learn something interesting about the other person.
The more you know about someone, the more reason you have to follow up with them and find you have something in common.
Mo asks David Burkus: How can we keep focused on doing the right things when we are constantly distracted in this virtual world?
The short answer is to not focus on it. Studies have shown that when timelines are too far away we tend to think that it’s going to be too difficult to accomplish. This applies to health and investing, as well as career goals. The key is to make the long game into your short-term goal.
You will always default to the short term. Think about your long-term project and identify the milestones that will lead up to it, then focus in on those. This is especially important in a remote environment where no one is actively looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re getting things done.
Milestones have to be co-created with the client. Your team also needs a regular check in process where you cover three key things for each person involved: “What did we just accomplish?”, “What are we focused on now?”, and “What is blocking our progress?”
The real challenge in a client engagement is when nobody wants to admit they need help. If you take the time to record those regular check-ins and address the obstacles to progress, you can avoid that situation.
Without a regular cadence of communication, you can end up with a client that is really angry with you and you may not know the reason why.
Mo shares his insights from the habits of David Burkus.
Figuring out how to work and thrive in a virtual world is only going to become more important going forward.
We need to have an agreement with our internal teams and our clients regarding how we are going to work together and communicate with each other. You need to know which platforms are meant for what kinds of communication so that you can be more efficient and effective.
Once you work it out internally, you can share it with your clients and give them an idea of how you can work together while also giving them a model to implement in their own businesses.
White space built into your remote meetings is crucial. The white space around traditional in person meetings doesn’t happen anymore and that was where the informal chat occurred that allowed relationships to develop naturally. Add space to your calendar to have the meeting before the meeting to make this easier.
Be more intentional with your questions. In a virtual world it’s even more important. Being general upfront and asking questions that can be answered either personally or professionally are great for opening up the possibility of getting to know the person.
The Champagne Question is a great first step to helping a client craft a future that’s better for them. People need positivity and optimism in their life and you can add that to their life by asking them the right questions and exploring the answers.
In a recent episode with Leidy Klotz, we discussed how our brains are wired to add, not subtract. This means that we need prompts to help us figure out what to subtract from our lives for increased success. So in this solo episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I am sharing some tips for you on how to focus on the right things and subtract the wrong things.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
How to find your Grow Big Index
How understanding your value in the marketplace can help you find what you need to get rid of
The two calendar-driven ways to find what to subtract
The event-driven ways to subtract
How you can keep these three triggers top of mind during your workflow
As Leidy says, to do great things, we need to subtract the less valuable things. Baking these three triggers into your workflow should help you keep this top of mind so you can regularly remove the things that you need to.
If you haven’t already listened to the episode with Leidy Klotz, make sure to do so. It was a fantastic interview and Leidy had so much value to offer. You can tune in here.
Making a Habit of Nurturing Your Relationships with Yiannis Gavrielides
01:02:37
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I sat down with Yiannis Gavrielides who is the CEO of a really cool tech startup called Covve that is focused on deepening relationships. I’m excited to have him on the show to talk about how this technology is helping people everywhere remember to do their reach-outs and follow-ups and how to do so effectively for building and deepening those relationships.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
How Covve is helping people make a habit of nurturing relationships
The importance of differentiating yourself in growth and career
How relationships help build trust
Ways you can deepen your relationships
The benefits of just trying to be helpful to people
Why you should always take notes when relationship building
Why you should focus on human connections and vulnerability
Ways to stay top of mind with people you meet
Following up as the introducer and as the introduction recipient
How Yiannis continues to learn through meeting people
Lies people tell themselves about networking
What Yiannis does to stay on track
I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Yiannis. Building and deepening your relationships is so important if you want to grow your book of business. Yiannis is working to help people make habits of nurturing their relationships with his new tech and I am so excited to see how this grows.
If you want to learn more from Yiannis, check out the Covve website and connect with him on LinkedIn here. You can email him at Yiannis@covve.com. Yiannis is offering a special discount code for our listeners - click here to get the Premium Covve Personal CRM App with the discount already applied, or use code “BIG2023” at checkout!
If you want to learn more about the High Impact Relationship Deepeners, you check it out here.
Today we’re talking about how to add value to your interactions with clients when there’s nothing to really purchase in the moment. Reliability is important, but sometimes going the extra mile is worth more.
Do things without asking. It could be as small as a handwritten note. And because of that small extra effort, that small unexpected gesture, you will add value to yourself in the eyes of your client because they associate you with going above and beyond!
This episode will cover things like:
Using the unexpected to drive curiosity
Adding value to your interactions with others
Creating enjoyable experiences
Incorporating this “Do the Unexpected” principle into your interactions with other people will help to build your business relationships and encourage loyalty.
If you enjoyed listening today, tune in to the next episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue where we’ll be wrapping up our series on using curiosity to advance your business!
Mentioned in this episode:
Glen Jackson on Preeminence – What You Need To Succeed:
Accelerating Trust In Your Relationships with Empathy with Michael Ventura
00:58:16
Wondering how to accelerate trust in your business relationships? You’re going to love this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue! I sat down with Michael Ventura to discuss his two books: Applied Empathy and Prioritizing Purpose. Michael dives into the topics of empathy and purpose, and shares why you can’t have one without the other.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
How to get better at empathy in your relationships
The power of genuine curiosity and thoughtful action when talking to others
Tips for applying empathy in your life and business
Ways to accelerate trust in your relationships
The Depersonalization Model for breakdowns in communication
Michael’s new book about prioritizing your purpose
How to get started thinking about your purpose
What you need in order to be productive in your life
The power of saying no to the wrong things so you can say yes to the right things
The key to finding your potential
Empathy can be one of the biggest unlocks for leadership development, and I hope this conversation with Michael inspired you to add more empathy into your relationships.
If you want to check out David Burkus’s TED Talk on finding and communicating purpose in a large organization, you can check it out here. You can listen to Jenny Blake's episode all about finding more free time in your business here.
Monty Hamilton Uncovers How to Learn to Appreciate the Problem
01:08:56
Monty Hamilton shares the principles and strategies he used to start his career, launch Rural Sourcing, and grow the company up to 1,000 employees. Find out why business always boils down to relationships, why the key to solving client problems is to appreciate those problems, and discover the framework for growing both a business and your personal skills.
Mo asks Monty Hamilton: Take us back to the moment when you realized that growth was great and it was something you wanted to focus on.
Monty landed a job at Arthur Anderson Consulting out of business school, where he got his start learning how to program in COBOL. Business process reengineering and strategy became part of his day to day eventually. It was there that Monty met the group of guys that would start Clarkson Consulting with him in North Carolina.
Business development came into the picture after Monty realized that if he could sell work where he lived, he wouldn’t have to travel far from his new family. His success became a matter of landing new work, so he decided to become good at it.
Business all boils down to relationships and solving problems. Monty realized that going into a relationship with the goal of making a sale was counterproductive and so committed to a mindset of helping instead.
You've got to spend an adequate amount of time appreciating the problem. If you can help a person identify and paint the picture of how gnarly their problem is, then you’re in the right room.
Appreciating the problem starts with listening and asking good questions, and then discovering whether the issue is a symptom of the problem or if there’s something deeper.
What are the upstream and downstream effects of the problem? Who else is impacted by it?
What’s in it for the person you’re talking to if you can help them solve the problem? How will it help their career?
Mo asks Monty Hamilton: What is your personal definition of business development?
Growth is simply about relationships. Being valuable to someone is intrinsically rewarding.
Over the course of Monty’s career, the Give To Get mentality became a core part of how he built the business. Fundamentally, it’s about whether or not you can create a truly authentic and transparent relationship with someone while helping them.
Don’t focus on what you’re going to get out of a relationship. Instead, focus on being around interesting people that you can also learn from.
When you’re networking, throw away the title and industry and try to get to know a person’s story. In addition to being more effective at developing business, getting to know someone on a personal level is what makes life more enjoyable.
Once you land the first meeting, do your research and invest some of your personal time and energy into making their business better, regardless of the end result.
If you’ve got something valuable and you deliver that in a highly personalized and warm way, you’ve got a chance to meet anyone.
Come in with some interesting, customized, tailored questions that show your ability to help and bring perspectives that the client could benefit from. The goal of the first meeting should be to secure the second meeting.
Mo asks Monty Hamilton: What’s your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG Training or Snowball System?
The blueprint of Monty’s business is think big, start small, scale up.
Rural Sourcing started out as a 10 person organization and has since scaled up to 1,000 employees, with the future goal of 3,000 employees and 30 centers all over America.
It’s a growth mindset that can be applied across a 10,000 person organization, but it can also be applied to your personal life. Great intentions can be sabotaged if you try to do too much, too fast.
Recognize that, as an individual, you will never be able to do it all. You have personal limitations and must be able to recognize those limitations to unlock your business’ potential.
You’re not going to be perfect on day 1 or day 10,001. The goal is continuous improvement. With that mindset, you can do better, you can get bigger, you can do more.
Being willing to reinvest is critical to knowing where you can add value and where someone else can add the value that’s missing.
To scale up to the next level, you need to understand your strengths and your weaknesses, and to know that you need to ask your peers, colleagues, bosses, and people you can trust to give their honest opinion.
People are usually happy to give you feedback, and when you find someone willing to give it to you because they want you to be successful, you may have found a great mentor.
Mo asks Monty Hamilton: Tell us a business development story that you are really proud of.
Monty’s proudest moment occurred three years ago, when they sold a stake in Rural Sourcing to Bain Capital. It took building the right relationships and getting people to believe in the mission, vision, and story of the organization.
Monty brought them into the center in Alabama to give them a feel for the culture and the organization beyond the numbers. After visiting the center, Monty and the crew from Bain Capital had their flights delayed, so he had the opportunity of spending five hours in a rental car with them.
No matter how well you practice and prepare, there are always going to be curveballs thrown your way. If you can take them in stride and play your hand well, you can come out the other side and you will win more than you lose.
The part of the story that Monty was most proud of was his confidence in himself and his ability to be authentic with people that could have been intimidating. Being confident and authentic is what allows you to perform in business development situations, whether that’s selling your business or selling the next deal.
When you’re authentic, the other person knows exactly what they’re buying. It’s much worse to pretend and end up delivering subpar results.
Mo asks Monty Hamilton: If you could record a video and send it back to your former self, something around business development or growth mindset, what would it say?
Monty would tell himself to not settle. Looking back, he can see that he didn’t always have the abundance mindset he needed to grow past barriers.
He would also say to take more risks and that it’s okay to fail.
The third thing would be to enjoy the journey more and be less fixated on the end destination.
The pandemic has made celebrating the journey more difficult, but also more precious at the same time. You have to be more intentional in creating those moments.
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m talking about how you can use social media as a lead generation tool. This one is tricky because few people do this well. There is a method that you’ll want to stick to when going this route. Essentially, you want to post content and use social media to amplify it. Then, you get targeted about who you want to meet and get that content in front of them.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Who should use social media
How to do it properly
How to be successful with this method
The goal with this method is that you want to go from social media to actually talking in person. Avoid using a spray-and-pray approach. You want to orchestrate this correctly so that you can get into a conversation with the person you’re hoping to so that you can create new relationships and potentially get hired.
If you want to learn more about social media for lead generation, make sure to check out The Snowball System. It has some really great information on the topic in chapter six.
Craig Budner on His Go To Grow Philosophy – Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:14:19
Mo asks Craig Budner: When did you realize that business development is good?
Craig’s brother was a litigator and from an early age had his own firm. This taught Craig the necessity of creating a brand and cultivating referral sources in order to grow the firm.
Craig took a slightly different path from his brother in that he joined one of the firms in Texas. It was there that he created the relationships and connections that made him realize the value of being an advisor to someone and not just on legal issues.
After creating a relationship with one of the firm’s important executive clients, a partner encouraged Craig to run with what he was doing. During his associate days, Craig learned the value of doing a great job for clients and nurturing relationships.
When he understood that clients were actual multiple sources of revenue, and that if he could cultivate relationships with people directly in his path of work delivery, he started to get the first call. He was being trusted by the people in charge of important projects, and that gave him the opportunity to do more fun kinds of work.
How do you advise others to think about business development?
Demystifying business development is the first step. The characteristics of good parents, friends, and listeners are the characteristics that make a good business developer. It’s not about the money at the end of the line, it’s about growth and learning, and getting better at putting yourself in the shoes of someone else.
What do you think about mutually beneficial relationships?
You have to be a better listener than a talker to develop deep relationships. If you’re always thinking about what you’re going to say, you’re not going to get enough information out of that relationship to make it mutually beneficial.
Think about how you can be helpful to that person. You can leave a positive impression on that person by reflecting back that you have heard them and you’re going to try to advance their issue.
Henning Streubel, Linda Klein, and Mark Harris Discuss Why It's Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:46:38
Mo asks Henning Streubel: When was the moment that growth and business development was something you wanted to focus on?
Henning is intrinsically motivated to help people, but it’s less about business development and sales. Whenever he meets someone, he has a tendency to ask deep questions.
Early in his career working for a utility client in Germany, he realized that the client’s company had many more problems than he initially thought which he discovered by simply having a deep conversation.
Because of those conversations, the client was able to take Henning’s thoughts and ideas back to her boss and make positive changes.
For Henning, relationship development starts with insights, which allows you to create an impact and trust.
Many highly analytical people have difficulty talking about anything outside of the project. Henning recommends understanding that everyone is a human being which means they share a common foundation.
Being genuine about being curious is key. Don’t just use small talk as a way to open a conversation.
Follow up on the topics and go deeper. This shows your interest in them as a human being.
Establishing a personal relationship makes connecting with them easier outside the context of the work. It creates an entry point that lets you have the impact you want to have.
When you open up on your experience, you become more vulnerable and that creates a better foundation for trust. This was something that Henning had to learn and practice. Having a few stories in your back pocket can make it easier.
Mo asks Linda Klein: When was the moment that you realized that growth was great?
Linda separates the ideas of business development and building a relationship. In the beginning of Linda’s career as a lawyer, she spent a lot of time learning about her client’s business and that relationship building always paid off.
It’s not about developing the business, it’s about developing the relationship.
Linda tells the story of how her grandfather started a grocery business in the early days of the Great Depression, how understanding and getting to know the people in the community became a crucial reason for their success, how that also inspired Linda and how she built her career.
When meeting new people, Linda is always looking for the things outside the day-to-day business relationship that are important to them. There is always a place where you can connect.
It’s important to be hireable and to share your expertise, but it’s more important to be human first.
Start with something relatable instead of leading with your area of expertise and what services you can offer. The number one correlation to likeability is commonality. Always look for the common areas you can connect on.
Every conversation and interaction you have will be different, but the person you’re speaking with will always give you clues. By offering details and asking for details, you’re going to find areas of commonality.
It’s extremely important for diverse members of your team to feel like they can find areas to connect.
Mo asks Mark Harris: Tell me a story of when you realized that you needed to focus on business development.
Mark takes us back to the summer of 1994 when he took on a job selling books door-to-door, a path that some of the most successful rainmakers have followed.
It started off as a way to make more money than working at the local McDonald’s but it became a skill that Mark learned he could get better at.
All skills are both learned and earned. Mark was initially not good at sales at all and after 12 hours of hearing no, he decided to flip his approach and try to make a connection with the person first.
He also learned that he needed to create little wins throughout the day to manage his energy and motivation.
The steps to a purchase are the same no matter what you’re selling. Connect with the person first and find out if you can solve their needs.
Mark also learned how to deal with his emotions at that time, and when he figured out how to do that he became a lot more relatable and fun to be around.
That whole first summer was all about being more relatable to people immediately after meeting them. After a couple sales, Mark figured out what he was really providing people with, and it wasn’t a book. When he took the focus off the money and made it about helping the other person, the sale became much easier.
By breaking the process into each individual piece, Mark created a series of small wins that were under his control. Even a rejection can be a learning experience.
When you put yourself outside your comfort zone, you become more capable emotionally of handling the experience and more likely to overcome the next hurdle, and every hurdle you jump builds your confidence.
Think about what you can do every single day to get you closer to your ultimate win. You don’t know when your next sale is going to happen, but if you can focus on what you can control it will happen.
How to Use The Speaker Lab to Deepen Relationships, with Grant Baldwin
00:14:31
Mo asks Grant Baldwin: How can we use speaking to deepen relationships?
One of the best things about speaking is that oftentimes it’s an in-person human experience. People do business with those they know, like, and trust, and there’s no better way for that than meeting someone in person at a conference or an event, especially if you’re a speaker who is seen as an authority.
Speaking at an event gives the audience a sense of who you are, and whether they can trust you to connect with their people. It’s a way to build the camaraderie and rapport that leads to future business.
Being a speaker at an event changes the way people think about you. Your perceived value and reputation skyrockets after speaking and you’re assigned a certain level of authority that’s hard to replicate in other ways.
Being a speaker also gives you the opportunity to get to know other speakers.
Speaking gigs don’t always result in commercial opportunities right away; sometimes they are a means of connecting to other speaking opportunities. You never know who will be in the audience and what that relationship could turn into.
Part of being a speaker is planting a lot of different seeds with a large number of people. Being a speaker is a long-term business and you can find opportunities by being persistent, following up, and just constantly showing up.
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, we are talking about in-person forums or what some people call roundtables. They’re basically one-time events that are in-person. Getting people together to talk about a topic is going to forever be a great way to meet new people and build new relationships.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What in-person forums look like
What to discuss at these events
Using scarcity for your event
The importance of following up
You want people that you already know and people that you don’t know. That’s what makes this a great lead-generation technique and something that fosters new relationships. Get people to come to your event, orchestrate conversations, and then make sure to follow up. The magic is in the follow-ups.
If you want to learn more about roundtables, make sure to check out this conversation with Craig Budner. He has an incredible way of explaining it all and I think you’ll really enjoy it.
Are you ready to truly flourish in your life and career? You’re going to love this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue. I sat down with Corey Keyes, the brilliant mind behind the book Languishing. We talked about the Five Vitamins for Flourishing essential to anyone who wants more growth and fulfillment in all aspects- particularly for those who are creating possibilities for others or growing a book of business.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What it means to languish
The differences between languishing and flourishing
The profound impact of mental health on our ability to thrive
The power of helping others in the world
Why learning something new is so important
Transcending the world through spiritual or religious practices
The impact of prioritizing warm, trusting relationships
The importance of active leisure time
How a quiet mind helps you put your best foot forward
I hope you enjoyed this episode with Corey! I highly recommend you take these Five Vitamins of Flourishing and apply them to your daily life today.
Mike Duffy on Business Development Habits – Time To Get Great At Business Development
00:19:49
Mo asks Mike Duffy: When was the moment that you decided that business development was important and you needed to get great at it?
Mike’s dad started in sales so he had a front row seat on making sales from the very beginning. He started his sales career by selling ad space in a travel magazine, and once he got out of college, Mike started selling ladies clothes in California.
He took a $500,000 territory and in 18 months turned it into $2.5 million. He won salesman of the year at the age of 24 and ended up having a beer with his sales manager which led to a conversation that changed everything for him.
Mike took a deep dive into discovering what really makes a good sales program and he became a student of sales for the rest of his career.
Mike teaches lawyers business development now under the assumption that he has to sell the idea to his students. The goal is to help them understand that adding value to a relationship or closing a deal is sales by another name.
If we want to live the life we want, we have to get great at growth.
Start with the people you are going to call and how you can have a conversation that creates curiosity. That allows you to learn about what they need. Business development is about helping people.
Business development habits set you apart when it comes to employment as well. It’s hard to ascertain someone’s technical expertise in a 30-minute interview, but it’s obvious when you care, listen intently, and make the conversation about the other person.
You always have to be thinking about the long game. Some prospects may not turn into clients for years, so you need to focus on just moving the ball a little bit further each day.
Be transparent, have humility, and be honest. Tell people when they are your #1 target and allow them to shape the relationship in a way that’s valuable for them.
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I am sharing another short and impactful solo episode. I'm sharing a powerful mantra that will transform your approach to client relationships—something you can keep in mind every day for the rest of your career. It’s "Fall in love with their problem." This mindset shift can redefine your career and elevate your success by aligning your solutions with your clients' deepest needs.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
How to actually fall in love with your client’s problems
The one thing a truly great advisor does for their clients
How regular, proactive client engagement with valuable insights will help you be more successful
I hope you enjoyed this quick and powerful episode. Remember, falling in love with your clients' problems is the key to providing unparalleled value and growing your career.
Don't forget to check out my new book, Give to Grow, releasing on August 27th, 2024, and sign up for the free companion course at givegrow.info for additional training and tools.
In the last episode, I covered hireable ways that you can follow up with new people that you meet. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m sharing a second, completely different way to follow up that shows that you’re human. Of course you want to be hireable, but you want to show that you’re human too.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Why you want to focus on human follow-ups too
How to show commonality
What types of notes to take
If you take notes on hireable follow-ups and human follow-ups, then you end up having a big huge list of meaningful ways to follow up. Avoid only using hireable follow-up methods. It is so important to be human too.
If you want to learn more about following up in a human-centric way, make sure to listen to my interview with Grant Baldwin. We had a great conversation about it and I think you’ll really enjoy it.
The Top 3 Things You Need to Implement from Ron Tite, Author of Think. Do. Say.
00:13:39
Mo shares his insights from the habits of Ron Tite.
Think: What’s the thing you believe in so much that you would be happy to work on it for the rest of your working life?
Do: How do you exemplify that? People don’t judge you by the things you say, they judge you by what you do. Actions are what signals what you believe deep down.
Say: How do you communicate what you believe? Too many people jump to this part before figuring out everything else.
Be comfortable with your imperfections. Authenticity means being okay with who you are, even when you make mistakes or ask dumb questions. Share your journey because we are all always learning.
When people are focused more on progress than a result, they are more comfortable with sharing that they are not perfect and those are the kinds of people that others want to be around.
Add some humour to your communication. Ron’s background in stand up comedy gives him a good foundation for making a conversation enjoyable.
Be a good entertainer and great host. Don’t be so focused on the content you’re teaching or discussing that you become boring.
Studies showed that if you tell a joke at the beginning of a negotiation it reaches a better result and people rate the negotiation higher. Even an attempt at humour that doesn’t hit the mark is better than being boring and dry.
The Business Development Story That Changed Everything for Henning Streubel
00:13:58
Mo asks Henning Streubel: Tell us a business development story that you are particularly proud of.
Henning’s story begins with a rough start where a client CEO read an unflattering internal email about himself that he was never meant to see. Henning went to apologize in person and ended up having a great conversation that turned into an offer to have a second lunch in the future.
During the second conversation the client began to open up about the challenges he had been experiencing, and Henning realized that he had gained this CEOs trust.
Henning engaged some of his colleagues to help with the challenges the CEO was facing and this created the basis for a larger transformative project with the company. Today, Henning and the CEO are good friends.
Henning is most proud about being able to overcome his discomfort with the initial situation and doing the right thing.
Growth and comfort can’t coexist. The skills needed to develop a relationship aren’t innate. You can start right away to develop your skills, and it is possible to add value to someone else’s career even when they have more years of experience than you.
Henning is always thinking about how to take his professional relationships into a more personal realm because that’s where he can deliver the most value. The challenge is in connecting with people with different personalities and experiences and then helping his team do the same thing.
on.bcg.com/henning - Use the envelope icon on this page to get in touch with Henning directly
29 Apr 2022
Going Back In Time, What Henning Streubel Would Say To His Younger Self
00:18:22
Mo asks Henning Streubel: If you could record a video around relationship development and send it back to your younger self, what would it say?
Henning would send three points back. The first is that you have to care about the people. You can only develop relationships when you care about the other person and their issues.
When you are engaging with them, it’s not about just showcasing your expertise and what you know. It’s about listening to them and what they want. If you come with a cookie-cutter approach, you won’t establish trust. Understanding what the other person needs and bringing a customized approach is the key to trust.
This kind of work is a team sport. Think about how you can compliment your own skills and strengths with your team so you can offer a holistic value to your clients.
The basis for all those lessons is that you aren’t born with these skills and consistently learning them over time is okay.
It is vital to respect the individual clients and companies that you work with.
Not everything goes to plan. For Henning, he overcomes setbacks very quickly by looking forward rather than backwards. Feel the pain and then move on.
Everybody needs to find their own way of processing pain, leverage the learning, and move forward again. It doesn’t help us as a society or as leaders to dwell on setbacks for too long. For Henning, that means going for a run or a bike ride. For others, that could be having a conversation with someone they trust.
on.bcg.com/henning - Use the envelope icon on this page to get in touch with Henning directly
20 Apr 2022
Read Davis' Favorite Business Development Strategy
00:10:39
Mo asks Read Davis: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG Training or the Snowball System?
Successful sales and business development is psychology, which is why Read’s favorite science is the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. It’s critical to understand who you are and how you learn, as well as how you react when you get challenged.
The most impactful aspect of business development is the sum of all its various parts.
Being able to quickly understand who the person is and how they communicate is how you take someone from a cold call to a warm relationship.
Read prefers going to the office where someone works to have a meeting with them to get a better idea of how they think. It’s possible to observe little details in the environment and how a prospect answers questions that will give you an idea of how they think.
Try not to measure success in 30, 60, or 90-day intervals. True success is a long-term project and what you do needs to align with your long-term vision.
Revisit activities that aren’t performing well and see where the holes are in your process. Without identifying your weaknesses you’re going to waste a lot of time. There is always something to get better at.
From Prison to Purpose: How Tommy Breedlove Transformed His Life by Prioritizing Himself First and Focusing on His Purpose
00:55:08
Prepare to become legendary! In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I sat down with Tommy Breedlove who just wrote a book called Legendary that I got a ton of value out of and I know you will too. As someone who has spent time in prison, Tommy has a really unique journey and perspective and he’s sharing how we can learn to prioritize ourselves first, take control of our life and time, become laser-focused on what matters, and become legendary.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Tommy’s journey and the low point that changed everything
The people he met in prison that transformed his life
Why he started working with entrepreneurs and high-achieving people
The number one way we can live with purpose
The power of time-blocking and focusing on your zone of brilliance
The importance of getting laser-focused on the things that move the ball in your business
The mindset, attitude, and skill of managing money
Why we need to get rid of the word “busy” and why your time is your second greatest asset
How we can learn to say no
Unconditional self-love and how we can achieve it
The power of taking control of your life and being the captain of your own ship
I hope you enjoyed this powerful conversation with Tommy. As he says, you are your number one asset and you have to prioritize yourself first. It’s not selfish, it’s actually the most selfless thing you can do. I hope you read his book, take his advice, learn to lead, love, and respect yourself first every day, and become a world-class elite in your life.
600+ Thought Leader Perspectives on Leadership and Personal Growth with Ryan Hawk
00:42:17
What does it really take to lead yourself before you can effectively lead others?
In this episode, I sit down with Ryan Hawk, host of The Learning Leader Show and author of multiple books including "The Score That Matters." With over 600 episodes under his belt interviewing top performers, Ryan shares his thoughts around leadership, personal growth, and the mindset needed for sustained excellence. We dive deep into his personal purpose statement of inspiring others to value and pursue excellence, and how he lives this out through his four core values: being thoughtful, thankful, curious, and consistent.
We also discuss the importance of setting up systems and environments that make personal growth inevitable, including how to develop your own purpose statement and values that actually drive behavior change.
If you're ready to move beyond surface-level leadership advice and discover how to create lasting impact through purposeful living, this episode is your blueprint.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The critical first step most leaders skip when trying to lead others
A framework for developing your own purpose statement that actually drives behavior
How top performers are using daily questions to stay aligned with their values
Why having too many values can be worse than having none at all
The mindset shift that separates sustained excellence from temporary success
How to Position Yourself Uniquely So You Can Win More Often
00:07:50
How do you position yourself uniquely so that you can win more often? In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, I’m diving into the topic of positioning. I have found that this is very rarely taught but it’s a critical skill to make yourself unique in the mind of the buyer.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
The law of positioning
Why people don’t care about your accolades
The three words to use when talking to a client
People don’t care about your accolades, they care about how you are going to impact them. So try to avoid talking too much about yourself when speaking to clients. Simple messages win. You want to shape the decision criteria and convey your messages so that it shows a clear benefit to the client.
This may seem nebulous, but I’m going to give you the process of how to accomplish this over the next couple of videos. Make sure to check out the Cryder research that I mentioned in this episode. This research is incredibly powerful and I think you’ll really enjoy it.
This week we have been talking all about money. In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, we are talking about the idea that what costs more is worth more. We have all heard the saying “you get what you pay for.” In general, what costs more is more desirable, and this is important to keep in mind when you consider your pricing.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What to think about if you are more expensive
Why people want you more if you own your pricing
Why it’s a vote of confidence when people think you’re expensive
If you own your pricing and talk about it calmly, people will want you more. Do you want a car that is cheaper or more expensive? The mental heuristic is what costs more is more desirable. So don’t doubt yourself if you’re more expensive.
Own your pricing. Get aligned. If you share how great you are and you have high pricing, it all makes sense. It is a wonderful compliment when someone says that you are expensive. That is actually a vote of confidence.
Conley’s research on this topic is extremely interesting and I highly recommend you read it if you want to dig in deeper.
How to Hack Our Own Habits to Accomplish More, with Mitch Joel
00:10:22
Mo asks Mitch Joel: How do we hack our own proactive habits to succeed?
We all make time for the things that are important to us. As we’ve seen from the pandemic, we can fill our schedules with anything and feel really busy. The only way to do anything really well is to make time for it.
Your priorities won’t show up in your to-do list, they show up in your calendar.
Scheduling is not Mitch’s main way to track his time because he prefers not being stressed out by a strict or full calendar. An alternative to scheduling the most important things is the Jerry Seinfeld approach of putting an X on the calendar when you’ve accomplished the one thing you wanted to get done that day, and then try not to break the chain.
Start light and start easy. Mitch found himself struggling to get into books during the pandemic so he committed to reading just five pages a day. Little incremental wins make it more likely you’ll do more and can lead to even bigger wins throughout the day.
When it comes to growing a book of business, Mitch’s advice is to focus on your zone of genius and say no to things that don’t fit within that, then be the best you can be. Be clear on who you serve and what you do, and say no to everything else.
Insights From the Habits of Kelley O'Hara - Three Crucial Skills Every Business Developer Needs to Create Tremendous Growth
00:58:46
Mo Bunnell breaks down the three most important lessons shared by Kelley O’Hara and applies them directly to growing your business and winning more engagements. Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset, create a powerful feedback system that steadily builds momentum, and why preparation is your ultimate confidence-building weapon.
There are three major pieces of content that Kelley O’Hara talked about in her interview that apply directly to business development: having a growth mindset, focusing on what you can control, and preparing to make progress.
A common mistake that business developers make is in preparing to win engagements instead of preparing to make progress towards the goal.
It can’t be said enough, business development can be learned. It doesn’t matter where you start or where you are now, there is always another level to grow to. Business development is such a complex skill that no one is born with it.
Any complex skill is the roll up of dozens and dozens of skills, and because of that, no one is born with all of those. Nobody is born with everything they need. Business development is so in depth and requires so many hard and soft skills that it’s impossible to be excellent in all of them and there is always more to learn.
Self-reflection is crucial to a growth mindset. For Kelley, the off season is when she really hones her craft. For business developers that want to get better at a skill, build in some time each week to decode how you did because your off season is in between meetings. Use a journal to track your progress and see where you are improving.
Build in feedback loops for anything you want to become more skilled at. Any time something important happens and other people are around, ask them two key questions.
When you frame a feedback loop in that way you will get really good information and it will help you improve. The problem with vague feedback is you will usually get positive feedback without the area to improve upon. Remember, asking better questions will give you better answers.
Business development has less feedback than many other aspects of life, which can make it very difficult to know what to improve. Aim to disconnect yourself from the outcome so that you can keep moving forward.
Perception, action, will. Whenever you’re in a moment that doesn’t seem to be going well, pull back and get some perspective, do something about it, and then keep at it. People often quit sooner than they should, don’t get discouraged.
Track what you can control and use it as your motivation. Decode what you need to focus on to get results and develop a system to track what you can control to reach the goal. Even subjective measures are better than not tracking anything.
Another common mistake business developers make is either tracking way too much and getting overburdened and burning out, or not tracking things that can move the needle because they’re too subjective. Start with simple tracking measures and build it out from there.
There is no way that someone else can do the tracking for you. When you document what you do and your business starts to take off, you can go back and see what you were doing prior to the growth to connect the dots. Build in some time on a quarterly basis to do some deeper reflection and figure out what you need to prioritize in the next time period.
Focus on preparation instead of perfection. If your bar is perfection, you will end up disappointed and in a negative thought loop. If you feel prepared going in, you are far more likely to perform better. Alternatively, if you feel unprepared, you will spend a large amount of time and energy just being stressed instead of performing at a high level. Do everything you can to prepare and walk in confidently.
Do you know what your set pieces are? Think of a meeting as a bunch of set pieces that are put together in a random order. Prepare for those scenarios and you will be ready no matter what happens.
There are several things you can do to prepare for a meeting. Write down your goal for the meeting and how you can frame it for the other attendees. You are going to win meetings in the first five minutes, not in the last five minutes.
Plan for dynamic changes in every meeting. Think of the things that you are most afraid of happening and prepare for them and you will feel much more confident going in.
Think through the most interesting questions you want to ask the person on the other side of the table. Also think about some of the questions they might pose to you and how you can engage them in a compelling dialogue.
Think about the aspects of relationship building and how you can show commonality. There is a lot of research that shows commonality correlates to likability and likability correlates to purchasing.
Preparing for weeks is the most important thing to keep up your business development progress. The week interval is so ingrained in our minds that it’s the perfect cadence for planning. Consider what actions you're going to take in the next week to make progress towards your goals or move a client through your pipeline.
Rainmakers are the people that plan their weeks out and do a little bit each day to grow their business. Plenty of business owners end up in a roller coaster effect where when they get busy, they stop pushing business development forward, everything dries up.
A quick recap on three major things learned from Kelley O’Hara.
Mo retells the story of a company his team worked with and how they attacked a particular problem. The team figured out the three most important metrics to track and how those metrics improved over time.
Learn the concept of the Give To Get and how to create a 60- to 90-minute strategic investment in a relationship. Mo’s team picked a few Give To Gets to build on and included those in the metrics they tracked.
In terms of business development hours spent each week, the organization saw a 710% increase in time spent in only a few short weeks. They also almost doubled the amount of meetings requested with a jump from 60% to 96% in acceptance rate. They also saw a decrease in the Give To Gets scheduled because they became so busy with work.
Just by tracking a few key metrics can lead to some incredible, business transforming results. After getting through the first few months it can generate a huge amount of momentum.
In this episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, join me as I delve into the world of effective communication with Vinca LaFleur, a seasoned speechwriter who wrote speeches for a former American president. From her experiences in the Clinton Administration to founding her own company, West Wing Writers, Vinca has mastered the art of crafting compelling communications for senior leaders. I’m excited to have her on the show today to talk about how you can structure your communication. From one-time speeches to long-term campaigns, Vinca shares invaluable insights and practical tips to help you refine your messaging skills and captivate your audience.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
Vinca's remarkable journey from the White House to founding West Wing Writers
The best formulas for elevating your communications like a pro
Excellent examples of effective communication structures in action
The difference between presenting solutions and creating a vision and why it matters
Quick tricks to catch your audience's attention while speaking
A secret strategy for effective communication on the fly
The secret to making sure your communications don’t go awry
The key to long-term communication success
I hope you are able to use these fantastic tips from Vinca to enhance your communication skills and foster genuine connections in both your personal and professional life today!
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